Mosley

If you’ve read my 2 most recent journals, you know that I’ve been learning more about the meaning of my name. My first name means valley of the river Kent, or royal valley. My middle name means helper or defender. And today I’m going to talk about my last name.

My last name is Mosley. “Its first element Old English mus 'mouse'.”

Mouse.

My last name means mouse.

And you’re probably thinking that there’s nothing to that, or that it’s weird that I’m writing a whole journal entry about my last name meaning mouse. But I’m going to tell you why that is so cool to me.

Many of you know that I moved out to Pittsburgh a little over 2 years ago to be a worship intern with Amplify Church. Shortly after I had moved here, one of the worship leaders here at Amplify was working up in our studio, and one of my friends mentioned that we should go up and hang out with him. I was terrified. I’d never really talked to this leader before, and if I’m being honest he was one of those people that I thought was so cool that I was super intimidated by him. But, we went up to the studio, and he ended up finding out that we were worship interns, so he had us sing for him a little bit. I was super nervous, so I sang pretty quiet.

A couple of weeks later, I was rostered to lead worship at youth group. I led Way Maker, and when we finished the set I walked to the back of the room to put my mic away and I stopped in my tracks when I saw this same leader standing against our sound booth. He looked at me and just nodded his head.

“Okay, mighty mouse.” He said. And that nickname stuck. Every time he’d see me- “MIGHTY MOUSE!”

I heard it regularly, but that doesn’t mean I really believed what he was saying. I wanted there to be something bold within me, I *knew* there was, I just struggled to actually live that out.

I was in a battle for a really long time. I saw boldness in other people, but I lacked the confidence to be bold myself. And then came a joke one day from somebody that knew my nickname. “Need to just start calling her mouse, she’s not so mighty.” It took everything within me to not quit. I wanted to walk away, I wanted to give up, I didn’t know how to be mighty. I felt like there was nothing bold about me. And I didn’t know why I felt this way, I didn’t know what to do. I struggled for way longer than I’d like to admit, and if I’m being honest, there are still days that I have to fight these feelings. Because I know deep down that’s what they are- they’re just feelings. They are not truth.

There was a Sunday where my family came to visit back in February. It was our church’s vision Sunday. I remember being emotional the whole morning, so excited for what God was going to do in the room for other people. I was excited for there to be baptisms, excited that there would be people giving their lives to Jesus, and I knew that we’d be sharing a lot of what our church had done over the past year. I went into this Sunday super excited, but not even for me, I was just excited for other people. But that’s something that I’ve had to learn, and it’s something that I’m still learning- that God wants to do crazy things in other people, yes, but He also has that same heart for me. And so I go into this Sunday, and I come out totally wrecked. God placed things on my heart for other people, but He also used 3 different people who really didn’t know me that well to speak into what God has been telling me that I’m meant to do for the past few years. But He didn’t stop there. That following Wednesday, I would be sitting in the back of our theater during our staff rally while everybody in the room would be praying for each other, and God would send somebody to the back of the room to pray for me. He sent somebody to a place where I felt like nobody could see me. But then He sent another person after that to come and pray for me, and another person to sit with me and hold me while I cried. I was overwhelmed at the way He kept showing me that He was chasing me down, that He wanted me and He wants to use me.

But there was still the struggle, and I didn’t know why. I kind of forgot about all of these things spoken over me, and I went back to struggling to believe that there really was something inside of me. I lived the next 2 months believing that I was to be used in the background, and that there wasn’t enough inside of me to be a great leader. I went back to being mouse.

And then came another Sunday morning. I was going to be leading worship this morning, but when I woke up I felt such a heavy weight of shame on me. I’ve mentioned this before- it goes back to some trauma that I experienced a couple of years ago, and there are mornings where I wake up and struggle to get out of bed because I feel guilty. It was a secret that I’d kept for a few long years. And I didn’t realize what it was doing to me. But I’ll come back to this. Anyways, I wake up on this Sunday morning, I fight to get out of bed, and I start driving to church. I love praying on my drives to church, and I remember that morning just declaring that there was a reason why the enemy was trying to knock me out that morning, and I was praying that God would replace that heaviness with a level of expectancy that I’ve never even experienced before. And so I walked into church and came face to face with the leader who gave me my nickname.

“What’s happenin??” He asked me. I just shrugged my shoulders in response before saying that I was “just ready to go.” He smiled and nodded, and we got started with practice shortly after. We got about an hour in and he waved to the band. “We need to stop practicing and start worshiping. So we’re gonna take some time to just tune into what God is trying to do in the room. So if you feel something then sing it, but we’re not gonna keep practicing like we were.” He got off the stage and sat in one of the chairs in the front row. The worship team played in the background and we stood or kneeled as we entered into this moment. I started praying over the room, and I just kept hearing “holy holy”, and then all of the sudden these words started to rush out of my mouth. Mind you, I can never just start singing sentences, like I can’t just make songs up on the fly, but this song started to fly out of my mouth and my body felt like it was on fire. I was experiencing the Holy Spirit in a way I’d never experienced the Holy Spirit before. One of the guys started singing a song, and shortly after he stopped, one of the girls started singing what was on her heart, and I stood in my place, not lifting the mic up to my mouth. I felt like I couldn’t, because I wasn’t originally given a song that morning, so I felt like the two that had just sang had more permission to sing than I did because they’d been picked to lead songs that morning. And so I stood in that spot, body on fire, words coming out of my mouth, eyes closed, and I sensed something in front of me. I knew the lights had been shining on the singers, I could see the light through my closed eyes, but in this moment the light was gone. And so I opened my eyes to see this leader standing in front of me.

“It’s time for you to step up. I’ve been waiting. It’s time to go.” My eyes got wide, and the next thing I knew my mic was up to my mouth and I started to sing what was on my heart. I led the song, and then put my mic down. Another leader picked up their mic and sang another song, and then my mic was back up to my mouth and I was leading again. And as I was leading, I opened my eyes to see that I’d been dancing and I hadn’t even realized. The rest of the morning I was just anxious, not even in a bad way, but I was just excited to see what God was going to do during the service. I couldn’t sit still, I couldn’t take notes. I wasn’t nervous about “if this person does this song like they did during practice then it’ll go into my song, etc.” I was excited even if I wouldn’t be leading a song, even if that experience was just during practice. And as I sat and listened to Jason’s message, I was kind of blown away- he started saying “holy holy holy”, then started saying lines throughout his message that were in the song that I broke into during practice. It was like total confirmation in that moment that I had been tuned into the Holy Spirit.

And so we enter back into worship and one of the guys leads his song, and the moments after that are some that I will never forget. My eyes were closed, I was praying over the room, and I could hear our musical director in our ears telling us that we were moving into Be Praised (the next song in the set), and all I heard was instruments. My leader wasn’t singing. And similar to how I experienced it during practice, all of the sudden I could sense a shadow through my closed eyes. I opened my eyes and my leader was standing right in front of me.

“It’s you.” He said.

“Holy holy?” I asked him.

“Whatever you feel- go.”

I immediately picked up my mic and started singing Agnus Dei. I wasn’t nervous about not knowing the words or anything like that, I just sang.

After our set was over, I went to the back room to put my mic and pack away. As I started walking back, I saw my leader and for whatever reason I started to freak out “what if I let him down?” And as I was in the middle of this freak out, he looked up at me with the proudest look on his face and opened his arms to give me a big hug.

He said some really encouraging things, and ended it with “I call you mighty mouse because you may look small, but there is power in your voice. It’s welling up and I see it breaking. I see it.”

Later on, when I was talking to my best friend about the craziness of the morning, she told me that she had been watching the whole thing. She was watching me and my leader and she saw him go across the whole stage to stand in front of me and that I looked up at him with such confidence and just sang. I can’t think about it without still getting emotional, all these months later. What a beautiful representation of the way that God chases after us.

And in God fashion, that was not the end. About a month later, I went to our city service. And similar to how I approached our vision Sunday, I went into service not expecting anything crazy to happen to me- I was just expectant for other people. I wasn’t going into service with anything heavy weighing on my heart, I was just going to service. But I remember going into service thinking “you’re gonna cry tonight” and I didn’t really know why. So I go into service with one of my best friends, and we’re sitting up in the balcony of our city campus. There was a guest speaker (the same speaker who spoke the first Sunday that I ever attended Amplify, and ended up preaching a message that really impacted me and confirmed that I was meant to move here.) While they were preaching, they mentioned some stuff that brought me back to that first message I heard from them, and so I just started to go to war for the people that were maybe in a similar place to where I’d been when I’d heard that message. And so the speaker tells all of the pastors in the room to just start praying for people at the altar, including my worship leader. And I see him go up to one of my friends that’s on the worship team, and I can only assume that he was telling him that it’s on him to lead this service. So I’m up in the balcony going to war for my friend, praying that they would step out of their comfort zone as a worship leader. And then the speaker starts singing this song that has ALWAYS shown up throughout my life. Like it was one of the first songs that I remember ever singing at youth group, it was the song that I mentioned in my “I’m Ready” journal, it was one of the songs that we sang at Passion 2020 (which that whole conference was just so insane in the way that I experienced God), and it’s just shown up in such powerful moments throughout my life. And so I’m standing there singing this song and the next thing I know, my leader is grabbing my head. And he didn’t even have to say anything and I just burst into tears.

“There it is, let’s go. Let it all go, let it all go.” He kept saying. I could feel my body going numb, I couldn’t even hold my arms up anymore. He grabbed my arms and held them up for me. I heard him say “now, sing…SING.” And I sang like my life depended on it. I yelled these words out. I could feel something deep inside of me breaking. He chased me down again. And I knew what he meant as he said “let it all go.” God was using this leader to replace some hurtful things that other leaders had spoken over me. Leaders that knew my calling and told me that I wouldn’t have what it takes because I didn’t know enough. Which didn’t help with the fact that I had spent my whole life feeling like I was stupid, like I couldn’t learn things, like everybody else would always know way more than me. And in this moment, as my leader held my hands up, I could feel that vanishing. And it’s honestly something I don’t even think about anymore, I forgot about these things until I started looking back for this journal.

I started to lead bolder, but I knew that there was still something holding me back. Around the time that I shared my “I’m Running” journal, God was putting on my heart that it was about time I finally spoke up about the trauma I’d faced a couple of years ago. I realized that me keeping that a secret and me not talking about it, when it was something that made me hate myself, would always hold me back from being the leader I was meant to be. That a part of me would never be able to lead if I didn’t learn to open up to trusted people and actually start to work through it. And so I opened up to some people about it, and some crazy things have happened in my life since then relating to it and relating to the way it had made me feel. And I know that I’m not totally there yet, but I know that there is already way more freedom there than there was months ago. What happened then does not have the power to knock me out of God’s plans for me. He holds the power.

And so what I’ve been learning is that I need to stop waiting for permission from other people to do what God has already given me the authority to walk in.

God works beyond what we can see. So I may be tiny, but I know that there is something mighty within me, because the same power that rose Jesus from the grave lives inside of me. That’s the power that I claim.

I am Kendall Alexis Mosley. I am a daughter of the King. I am a helper, a protector. I am a mighty mouse.