It’s Just My Nature

George Zoebl

It’s Just My Nature tells the romantic story of Martha, a sixty-six-year-old retired professor who is dying of cancer in Hospice care, and Joel, a jaded, questioning clergyman who is unceremoniously ushered in to provide pastoral care. Martha, he finds, possesses some unique knowledge in communicative diseases that the government desperately wants to get before she dies.

Interspersed with the first person accounts by both Joel and Martha is the narrative of a certain village in South Sudan that has been brutalized by an ALFA raid. One of the young women, Farris, designs an unconventional plan to escape from her captives and save two younger children in a life-or-death race across the desert with her tormenters in close pursuit.

It’s Just My Nature is an intriguing web of connected stories that blends romance, adventure, theology, and geo-politics within an engaging and thought-provoking novel.

About the Author

George Zoebl is a jaded pastor who worked in El Salvador and knows firsthand the cruelty that needlessly vindictive, masochistic people impose on others for merely having a different point of view or different ideas about religion. He has also spent time in the Middle East, and he hopes that this novel will give readers a new understanding of what it means to “just leave people the hell alone” and let them live their lives if they are not hurting anyone. Secondarily, he wants the reader to know that senior citizens can and do have romantic lives. And it can sneak up on you, at any age, in any and all circumstances.