A couple of weeks ago I came across a photography giveaway on Instagram in celebration of international women day, the studio was one I had often seen in mainstream media and the process to apply was quite easy, so I did an application in roughly five minutes.

A week later, i’ll get an email that I had won the giveaway and would be getting a free photoshoot, which included a makeup artist and free lunch with drinks.

I already started talking my husband into coming with me for the day at the studio when I got another follow up email telling me that the shoot was a Luxury Boudoir one and I had to come in with “two 2-piece steamy lingerie sets”…

They carried on to explain how the studio exists to make women feel more confident about themselves, and so they empower women by taking powerful shots of them. I looked through their site, and truly it was full of powerful women in lingeries in all manner of suggestive positions.

Reading this gave me confidence to write back requesting a different kind of shoot because a shoot of me in a lingerie wasn’t going to boost my confidence in anyway, so if the focus was to make me feel more confident and powerful, then surely they’d consider what I might think confidence and power is. I continued to state that my values wouldn’t also support me doing that based on samples they had sent, and then I requested what other options I had, asides from the luxury boudoir option.

Someone replied me almost immediately and told me that if I’m not comfortable with the type of shoot, they’re happy to pass it on to someone else, to which I replied “That’s totally fine, thanks for your time”.

The 21st century Christian might call this persecution, and I bet Apostle Paul together with the patriarchs of faith will be laughing (lol). But on a serious note, it provoked deep thoughts in me nonetheless, about how the world is actually geared to operate contrary to the principles and teaching of scripture.

Has the bible detailed anything about boudoir shoots? I don’t believe so, but my concern was more the underlying motive and thought behind it, I wondered why their interpretation of inspiring a woman to feel powerful and confident will be reduced to a shoot of her in lingerie.

Something about that just didn’t sit right with me, and I guess maybe because of my passion to see women live out Gods plans and purposes for their lives.

I think the world will continue to curate and erect strange solutions to the insecurities of our flesh, and it gets more scary because the Christian might be deceived into taking these temporal solutions, as against rooting out fleshy weaknesses that just shouldn’t be there!

I honestly commend the studio for their work in attempting to make the female gender feel more confident and powerful, to which they may be achieving, but I’m worried for our generation and the ones to come.

Will we continue to make things up to make ourselves feel more confident or powerful, or will we embrace The One in whom lies all confidence and power and actually be confident and powerful?

All this to say; a woman is more than her body, her identity is more than feeling confident & powerful and if we want true confidence and power, we should go for the real source, not counterfeits that only excite the eye and flesh, but leave the soul and spirit dry.