When I first invited Scorpio Lamont onto Created in the Image of God, I knew two things:
- He worked with men on identity, purpose, and confidence.
- He had one of the most arresting names I’d seen on a guest sheet.
I didn’t realize how tightly those two were woven together.
What emerged in our conversation was the story of a man who buried his name as a boy, reclaimed it as a young adult, and is now helping other men reclaim far more than a label. He is, in a very real sense, walking middle-aged men back to who God intended them to be—from the inside out.
Underneath his story is a pattern that matters for all of us, not just men:
- The false identities we adopt to survive.
- The moment we finally say, “No one is coming to save me; I have to choose.”
- The slow, disciplined rebuilding of a life that matches who God created us to be.
Let me walk you through it.
Burying the Name
Scorpio’s story starts with a bet.
His mother, pregnant in the 1970s, didn’t know the baby’s gender. A friend—Miss Jessie—bet her it would be a boy. The stakes: whoever guessed right got to name the child.
Miss Jessie was right.
“And she named me after my birth sign,” Scorpio told me. “Except I actually came a month early, so I’m a Libra. But my name is still Scorpio.”
It’s a great story to tell as an adult. As a shy elementary-school kid in Maryland, it was torture.
Every first day of school, the same ritual:
- Teacher calls out each student’s first and last name.
- “Scorpio Mosley.”
- The class snickers.
- Little Scorpio tries to sink through his chair.
“After that happened a couple of times,” he said, “I realized at age seven that I had to figure out a way to hide in plain sight.”
So when the pre-school-year paperwork came home to be filled out by “parent or guardian,” seven-year-old Scorpio did something you might expect from a character in a novel, not a real child:
He changed his name.
He kept Lamont, his middle name, and turned “Scorpio” into a mystery initial:
Lamont S. Mosley
And the system accepted it.
“To my surprise, it worked,” he said. “They changed my name in the district. That’s what’s on my high school diploma today.”
It’s a small but telling image of what many of us do with our identities:
- We sense that something about us is risky, embarrassing, “too much”—our family background, our accent, a failure, a personality trait, even our faith.
- We push it underground.
- We present a safer, blander version of ourselves—a Lamont S. instead of a Scorpio.
It works. Sort of.
He wasn’t being teased about his name anymore. But internally, he was shrinking.
“I was a kid that kind of shied back,” he said. “I didn’t know the power of communication. I learned things the hard way. I started to realize I needed to hide in plain sight.”
For years, that was his posture:
- Don’t crash out.
- Don’t stand out.
- Blend into the herd.
He described it as a herd mentality: the chronic desire not to fail publicly and not to shine either.
Many men live there for decades.
Reclaiming the Name
Fast forward to age 24.
By now, Scorpio is in a leadership training program at a telecommunications company, preparing for a manager role. He’s not that seven-year-old anymore.
“I was pretty confident in who I was,” he said. “I was making my way into corporate America.”
He began thinking about how to reintroduce himself to the world.
The name “Scorpio” surfaced again—this time not as a liability, but as an asset.
“I tested it out a couple of times as an adult,” he said. “And people would say, ‘Man, that’s a pretty bad name. I like that name.’”
The same name that once triggered anxiety now elicited respect and intrigue.
“As an adult, you don’t want to be part of the herd,” he said. “You’ve got to differentiate yourself—for that job, that girl, that leadership role. My name allowed me to do that before they ever laid eyes on me or heard me speak.”
So he made a conscious decision:
“I adopted that name. I said, ‘I’m Scorpio Lamont.’”
He describes it as a pivotal moment:
- His voice grew.
- His confidence grew.
- His sense of purpose grew.
“That name that caused me so much embarrassment now felt like it gave me respect,” he said. “I can look back and say that’s what launched me into being the person I am today.”
There’s a pattern here that many of us, if we’re honest, can recognize:
- God gives us something—an identity, a story, a gift.
- The world mocks it, misunderstands it, or doesn’t have a place for it.
- We bury it to survive.
- Years later, when we’ve grown some courage, He hands it back to us, redeemed.
In my own life, my name—Wade Fransson—played a similar role. As a child in Sweden, in the middle of a domestic kidnapping and custody battle, my Swedish relatives couldn’t pronounce “Wade.” The closest they came was “va-de,” which in Swedish (due to some silent letters) sounds like Var det? Meaning “Was it?” Which naturally led to “Var det Va de”?My name became a question, a joke, an oddity. It didn’t help that the letter W doesn’t even exist in the Swedish alphabet.
I learned early that my identity was, at best, confusing and, at worst, a problem.
It took years—and several lifetimes’ worth of experience in ministry, business, and personal upheaval—before I could say my name without flinching, much less put it on a book cover.
Scorpio’s story is a vivid reminder:
Sometimes the first step toward a holistic identity is reclaiming the very thing you once tried to erase.
But it doesn’t stop with a name.
“No One’s Coming to Save You”
If Scorpio’s name story is the parable of identity, his work with men now is the practical outworking.
His core message is simple and jarring:
“No one’s coming to save you.”
That’s not cynicism. It’s a refusal to outsource responsibility.
We live in a cultural moment obsessed with labels and blame:
- Race.
- Class.
- Political tribe.
- Economic status.
- Church tradition.
Scorpio is not naïve. He grew up in a small Florida town with:
- One traffic light.
- Whites on one side of the tracks, blacks on the other.
- Klansmen rallying at a local hotel.
- Race riots in high school.
“Race has always been there,” he said. “It was front and center.”
He also knows what it’s like to lack role models who look like you.
“Part of the identity issue,” he told me, “is not seeing what’s possible. Being in situations where you don’t see the full possibility of who you can be, because no one looks like you that’s having that level of success.”
All of that is real.
But he refuses to let it be the starting point.
“The whole idea behind my platform,” he said, “is no one’s coming to save you. Regardless of whether you’re white, black, Spanish—whatever—you have to start with you.”
He’s not saying systems don’t matter. He is saying you cannot wait for systems to make you who you’re meant to be.
“If you look at the resources out there, the people who want to help you,” he said, “none of that matters until you decide to make a change.”
In a culture where we are constantly invited to define ourselves first by:
- Racial grievance,
- Party allegiance,
- Economic class,
- Or even denominational brand,
Scorpio keeps coming back to a more fundamental identity:
“We identify on politics, race, job type, income… long before ‘child of God.’”
That order is deadly.
Because if the most important thing about you is your grievance or your label, you will always be waiting for someone else—some politician, some policy, some pastor—to fix you.
“You’re created in the image of God,” he might say, borrowing the phrase from my show. “Act like it. Start there.”
Chronic Mediocrity Syndrome
One of the phrases Scorpio used that lodged in my mind was this:
“Chronic mediocrity syndrome.”
He described his younger self:
- Blending into the crowd.
- Avoiding attention.
- Passing up chances to stand up or stand out.
“There are these glimmers of greatness,” he said—moments where you could:
- Defend someone being bullied.
- Volunteer for leadership.
- Take a risk aligned with your gifts.
“But you shrink back,” he confessed, “because you’re moving with this herd mentality.”
He told a story about a smaller bully picking on a bigger friend. Scorpio wasn’t big, but he realized, “I can take this guy.” He stepped in and fought the bully.
He “stood in the gap.”
But those moments were the exception, not the rule.
Most of the time, the disease of chronic mediocrity—don’t crash, don’t stand out—won.
And it doesn’t only affect shy kids.
Many middle-aged men live in a chronic mediocrity that looks, from the outside, like success:
- They have a career.
- They have a family.
- They have some money.
“And yet,” Scorpio said, “they’re still wondering, ‘I’ve got the money, I’ve got the family… but something’s missing.’”
He sees that “something” as:
- A drift from their God-given identity.
- A life built more on inheritance from culture than on purpose from God.
- Years of avoiding the hard inner work.
“I was that guy,” he said. “And I know there are a lot of others.”
Theologically, this is not far from Jesus’ parable of the talents.
- Some servants take what the Master gives and risk it.
- One buries it out of fear.
- When the Master returns, the buried talent is not excused. It’s called wicked and lazy.
Chronic mediocrity syndrome is burying what God gave you:
- Your name.
- Your gifts.
- Your story.
- Your calling.
Not out of overt rebellion, but out of a desire to avoid failure and embarrassment.
The cure is not bravado. It’s not an instant overhaul. It’s a pattern of choices.
Which brings us to the moral of the story.
Thoughts, Habits, Destiny
Scorpio closed our conversation with a quote that’s been attributed to various sources over the years, but is spiritually and psychologically sound:
“Watch your thoughts, they become your words.
Watch your words, they become your actions.
Watch your actions, they become your habits.
Watch your habits, they become your character.
Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”
Then he added a statistic that puts flesh on it:
We make roughly 35,000 decisions a day.
“Those decisions,” he said, “are either giving us life, or they’re to our detriment.”
Over ten years, that’s more than 120 million choices.
They add up.
- One man spends those choices numbing himself with distractions and comparison on social media, always measuring his life against someone else’s highlight reel.
- Another spends them investing in his marriage, his kids, his craft, his community, his walk with God.
From a distance, one may have more visible privilege than the other. But the inner world—the “world between your two ears,” as Scorpio put it—is where destiny is being formed.
As Paul wrote in Romans 12:2:
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”
And as Jesus taught, the tree is known by its fruit—habits, character, destiny.
Scorpio is not calling men—nor am I calling anyone—to an overnight, Instagrammable transformation.
He is calling us to micro-habits:
- Spoon-feeding the soul, as he put it.
- Making one different choice today.
- Changing what we think about for five minutes.
- Taking one small but concrete step toward who we know we are meant to be in Christ.
“We make a mistake,” he said, “thinking we have to make wholesale changes. We’re in a microwave generation. It’s micro habits, micro behaviours.”
If you:
- Change 50 of your 35,000 choices today,
- 200 of them next month,
- 500 of them next year,
you will not be the same person a decade from now.
The key is aligning those changes with your true identity:
- Not primarily as black or white, conservative or progressive, rich or poor.
- But as a person created in the image of God.
- As a son or daughter with a name and a calling.
- As someone whose destiny is not fixed by the herd.
Scorpio had to:
- Bury his name to survive a season.
- Reclaim it to step into adulthood.
- Own his flaws and drift.
- Choose, day after day, to live as the man God purposed him to be.
The same pattern is open to you.
No one is coming to save you in the sense that no human system can do this for you.
But someone has already saved you—and stands ready to walk with you as you unbury your name, reclaim your identity, and begin making different choices:
The One in whose image you were made.
Coming Up Next on Created in the Image of God
Next week, for Valentine’s week, I’ll be talking with Dr. Marlena Graves, a pastor, scholar, and author of The Way Up Is Down. Her doctoral work engages culture, immigration, race, and poverty, and she weaves those themes into a deeply Christian vision shaped by Jesus’ life of downward mobility. We’ll explore why our flourishing is bound up with the flourishing of others—echoing the southern African concept of Ubuntu (“I am because we are”)—and why selective compassion is incompatible with the way of Christ. If you’ve ever wondered how to love your neighbour when your neighbour doesn’t look, think, or vote like you, you won’t want to miss this conversation.
