Mosely: Defender of Truth, Lover of Justice

I attended a writer’s conference this weekend.

I’m still mulling over my take-away thoughts scrawled in blue ink in my brown moleskin.

One of the topics was about discovering your passion as a writer.

The key speaker, Marybeth Whalen, advised us to think about what brought us joy as children.

“What were you passionate about at six?” she challenged us to consider.

And she shared a simple story about a friend of hers who is about to begin a business/ministry targeted to women, using fashion as the hook.

And how this woman has a photo of her first grade class where she is a mini fashionista amid the casually dressed elementary set.

And the point was –

sometimes what you loved as a kid, you still love as a grown up.

Sometimes what inspired you in first grade, is still inspiring you in your thirties.

I’m thinking about how that applies to me – as the current grown up/former kid that I am.

But I have also been thinking about how that applies to the six current kids/not yet grown ups living and breathing around me in this house.

Marybeth was encouraging us, as a side note, to be that voice for our own children.

So I have been considering

and thinking

and studying

and watching

my six passionate future artists/creators/thinkers/workers/dreamers/grown ups.

I have been thinking about what makes them cry or laugh or fight back or give up.

Today I was thinking about Mosely.

And how she is ridiculously quick to leave an unfair situation or a dispute with a sibling and seek me or Kevin out immediately.

How she marches up to us, fists clenched, eyebrows angled, demanding an audience with a higher authority than the back bedroom vigilantism that she’s been enduring.

And how,

for all these seven swift years of her young life,

this response has always been the same.

What’s the positive spin for her attitude?

What’s the gold to be filtered through the dirt?

And I think, for Mosely – it’s this.

The kid loves justice.

She knows right from wrong, good from bad, fair from unfair.

And she wants to defend truth and right.

She wants wrong to be punished and good to be rewarded.

Compensation.

Equity.

These are the battle cries of our Mosely.

(May she use them for good.)

And we know,

just like all virtues,

that the love of justice can not serve as the greatest good.

But I think,

as we begin to view our children in this light,

as we begin (Kevin and I) ,

to foster their passions and straighten their crooked hearts,

that our children will begin to find outlets for those passions.

They will begin the journey of matching

passion to calling

and

calling to passion

and perhaps even morph into

future grown ups

who think/write/create/live

in the beautiful tension

between

who they think they are

and

who God designed them to be.