Human Nature by John Roseboro

John Roseboro is invincible. You can feel his invincibility rolling off him in waves. It’s baffling, magnetic. Unsettling. “I’m walking with God,” he said when his mother asked him how he was. His faith is remarkable in that it is utterly unabashed. He does not hide or twist it to fit comfortably anywhere. He’s not afraid of being rejected. He’s not really afraid of anything, actually. You can feel that just standing next to him. It makes you wonder.

“I pray a lot,” John told me, when I asked if he ever has doubts. (He doesn’t.)

It made me wonder.

I grew up singing in church with my mom, and when our voices would harmonize, I sure felt something, and I called it God. Then Jesus became very uncool, and I rebelled, (or conformed, I guess) skipping down ‘love and light’ road straight to ‘you are the universe expressing itself’ island. Unfortunately, the black hole of “you just need more self-love” did NOT (spoiler alert) manage to heal my trauma and save the world, so by the time I met John I was just kind of floored by how... secure he seemed. He reminded me of my mom, grounded in and flowing with some source of love I couldn’t seem to keep hold of for more than a couple days.

“Build your house on rock,” I read somewhere in the Bible John gave me. It’s a phrase that often comes to mind around him. There certainly is no rug to pull out from under that guy.

“Can we pray real quick?” John will say suddenly when we hang out. Scrunching his eyes up like a child, he’ll start, “Heavenly Father...” His prayers are as simple and straightforward as if he were talking to me.

I don’t know how much time passed after meeting John before I finally summoned the courage to talk to God myself. Up until the moment I opened my mouth- and choked - I didn’t realize how terrified I was… that nobody would answer, that all the worst voices in my head were right, and that I was bitterly alone in an indifferent universe, an incompetent worm of a captain at the helm of my life. It took another half hour before I forced myself to squeak, “…… God? ………. God? ...............”


The third time I uttered, “God,” a teeny tiny candle somewhere deep in my heart sputtered unmistakably to life. It was not just an energy, or a force - It was a presence so completely personal that it moved me to tears because I felt, as I hardly ever do on this dang rock, completely seen and understood.

Today I can’t imagine how anybody ever gets through the world without that. The exhausting cycle of meeting someone, idealizing them, thinking they might understand me (even though I already know they can’t), and then still being let down, is utterly predictable but crushing every time. Until he said it out loud, “Obviously, there is a God,” it never hit me just how obvious it really was. A life without God, and without a relationship with God, seems to me now like a life spent covering your ears, shouting, “LA LA LA LA, I’M NOT LISTENIIIIING.” The world has become a great circus, a vapid do-whop commercial of tiny things- tiny goals, tiny pleasures, tiny dreams. The world has turned to smoke. The world turns on but now I stand transfixed, smiling at the trees and the sky with slow, warm recognition of who is behind all of this, and who has been here the whole time. After a few months I told John, “I want to be with God, too. I look at the people and the birds and the water and I think - This is the best art the world has ever SEEN. This is my taste. This is who I want to be friends with. God is the greatest artist.”

I’ve spent a lot of time drilling John on his faith. “How do you know what God wants you to do?” “How did you learn to be so disciplined?” “ How can you be SO SURE?”

“I pray a lot,” he answered me.

He prays a lot.

“Don’t try to be fancy,” he advises. “Just talk.”

John is not perfect. I used to think he was. (Meet, idealize, cold shower, repeat.) “There’s nothing more human than hypocrisy,” we concluded once over the phone. The inevitability of error tends to cripple me, but not John… I guess that’s faith. It’ll be the right thing at the right time for the right people because God is backing the enterprise. It sounds completely bananas until you feel it for yourself, until you reach out into the empty room like I did and call to God. That undeniable presence, and how very clearly other-person-ish it is (definitely not idiot me experiencing my idiot self) is the ONLY thing that could get me publicly talking about God at all. Believe me: I am so terrified of social rejection that I would never jeopardize what microscopic coolness I might have gleaned over the years by if I didn’t sincerely believe that it was... well, the most important thing to talk about it. Honestly, I really don’t even know anymore what else there is to talk about. Isn’t God the elephant in the room?

John has one goal: To communicate God’s heart. I don’t think a lesser intention could give anybody such drive as he has. He’s blown up with social media amongst a demographic as un-Christian as it gets, and neither he nor they seem to know what to make of that. Though John is amused, he isn’t exactly surprised. He smiles and says, “My success is inevitable.”

-Lizzy and The Palm

*feeding the soul*

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