A listener, a giver, and a cable gal

One of the big mistakes you could easily make, while chatting with or visiting Clara Rosser at her home, was to think you had to catch her up on something. Usually, it was the other way around. She was a woman ahead of her times.

Her mind was keen even about the nuances of theology, political theory, certain novels, the military, the role of academia in modern culture, and any of a hundred other topics.

But she was far too well-mannered to put you down for not knowing as much about something as she did. She was a good conversationalist partly because she was a diligent listener.

Did she learn all those skills as a girl growing up in the hardy culture of Buncombe County in the mountains of western North Carolina? Who can know—especially since, at 93, she outlived almost everyone who might have told us? And which shaped her more—the rigors of nursing education or the stalwart Presbyterianism of the Rev. Henry Dendy, her famed pastor from Weaverville, N.C.?

‘It’s not our money,’ she told me again and again.

Until her death in early September, Clara used all that learning to the fullest. As a healthcare professional more than a half century ago, she took note, with her physician husband Robert Rosser, of the boom in population that the space industry would bring to Florida’s mideast coast. Robert’s specialty was urology, prompting her to tell me coyly one time: “We knew that thousands of people would relocate here on the Space Coast. We also knew most of them would be men.” Until their retirement, Clara was always the supervising nurse of the Rosser practice.

She was also the administrator and business manager of their medical group. The record shows that her fiscal skills at least matched her medical prowess, energizing their capacity to exercise extraordinary stewardship—which she and her husband directed almost exclusively toward Christian ministry.

The Rossers’ investment in WORLD magazine over the last 25 years has totaled more than a quarter million dollars, with more on the way because of their diligent inclusion of WORLD in their will. All that was a sum they achieved in large measure through the discipline they imposed on their own quiet lifestyle. “It’s not our money,” she told me again and again. And that was always with a ready, peaceful, and generous smile—and an altogether believable promise to pray regularly for WORLD’s publishing task.

Yet make no mistake, Clara was a hands-on participant, and a bold adventurer. She enjoyed recalling the hesitance of a team of servicemen to run a telephone cable through the crawl space under the Rosser home. Seems that Clara had let slip that a coral snake or two had been seen in those parts. “Give me that cable,” Clara says she told the startled and reluctant fellows, grabbing one end and wriggling on her stomach the full length of the house. I think she was 85 at the time.

I’ve always loved that picture of Clara Rosser—caring little for her own comforts or safety, eager to see the mission accomplished, ready to jump in herself where others were hesitant to go. Hundreds of her fellow believers witnessed those same traits, even through recent years when she lost her husband and her own health began to fail.

That was perhaps especially true at Saint Andrew’s Chapel of Sanford, Fla., where she was a charter member and where those who knew her best asked her to lead in the initial groundbreaking for the current facilities. For Clara Rosser, the focus was always on the unvarnished biblical faith she’d first learned as a young girl in North Carolina and then had reinforced so diligently during her late-in-life years in Florida. It was an appropriate portrait of a committed saint, almost at the finish line, telling us where her priorities really lay. I pray others will step forward to take her place, echoing vigorously to each other: “Give me that cable!”

Email jbelz@wng.org