Signal Lost

At seventeen, Ezra had ten thousand followers and zero peace.

His life was a scroll  curated smiles, perfect captions, shallow joy. He called it influence; heaven called it noise.

When his church youth group signed up for a mission trip to Kenya, Ezra went for the photo ops. But on the first day, his phone slipped from his pocket and shattered against a stone path. No WiFi. No notifications. No audience.

The first night without his phone felt unbearable. The silence hummed like static. But by the third day, something unexpected happened, he noticed things. The way children laughed without filters. The way people prayed like God was actually there.

One afternoon, he met Pastor Amos, an elderly man with kind eyes and worn hands. “You look restless,” Amos said.

“I’m just… disconnected,” Ezra replied.

Amos smiled. “Sometimes you have to lose signal to reconnect to heaven.”

That night, Ezra prayed not for followers, not for success, but for faith. It felt awkward, like speaking a forgotten language. But the more he prayed, the clearer his heart became.

When the trip ended, Amos gave him a small wooden cross. “Keep this,” he said. “It doesn’t need charging.”

Back home, Ezra turned on his phone. The notifications flooded in. But this time, he didn’t feel the rush. He scrolled past the noise, posted a photo of the Kenyan sky, and captioned it: “Lost signal. Found peace.”

“Maybe losing connection is the only way to find one.”