Every engineer knows that when a system fails, you don’t start guessing—you put a probe on the line and trace the signal back to its source, watching for where it weakens, distorts, or disappears entirely. That’s what I’ve been doing these sixty-seven years: tracing the signal God sent into the world the night I was born in Kirbyville, Texas, and following it through noise, interference, dead zones, and moments of perfect, breathtaking clarity.
The first carrier wave came in strong: a boy in Buna listening to Sputnik beep overhead, lying in the pasture staring at stars that felt close enough to touch, taking apart a broken transistor radio on the back porch just to watch voices spill out like magic. That was the pure tone—undistorted curiosity modulated by a father’s quiet integrity and a mother’s stubborn faith. Grandpa Truman’s drafting table was the first antenna: every clean line he drew taught me that order could be imposed on chaos if you were willing to measure twice and draw once.
Then came the teenage years—atmospheric skip, bounce, fade. The signal scattered energy of scouting, summer river swims, and the first awkward pings toward a blue-eyed girl named Leisa. The signal was still there, but it was jumping, looking for a path.
College and early marriage brought multipath interference: two kids barely scraping by, barely enough money for ramen, anger echoing off the walls of a tiny apartment. I was transmitting on the wrong frequency—rage, exhaustion, pride—and the receiver (Leisa’s heart, our little home) was picking up mostly noise. For over a decade the trace showed severe attenuation: success on the scope at work, but flatline at home. I was transmitting, but the message was garbage.
October 13, 2000, 9:00 p.m., Orange, Texas. That was the night the repeater finally kicked in. On my knees at a simple prayer rail, surrounded by other broken men, the signal suddenly punched through—clean, strong carrier, no sidebands of pretense. Prevenient grace, the theologians call it. I just call it the moment Jesus turned the gain all the way up and said, “I’ve been here the whole time; you were just tuned to the wrong channel.”
Two years later the deepest null I’ve ever measured arrived: losing our only son Joshua in 2002. The scope went flat. For a while I thought the transmitter had been destroyed. But when I put the probe on the line again, I found the carrier was still there—weak, almost buried in grief, yet steady. The signal had changed modulation: it was now amplitude-modulated by pain, frequency-modulated by love that refused to quit. The waveform was no longer pretty, but it was true.
From that null onward, every project became part of the trace.
- The 80-hop microwave system for Gulf States Utilities? Learning how to bend a signal around the earth without losing the message.
- The fiber ring for College Station in ’96? Burying the cable so storms can’t touch it.
- The hundreds of SCADA channels for rural co-ops? Making sure the most important data gets through when everything else fails.
- The pandemic WISP so kids in Buna could log on to class? Boosting the signal for the least of these.
Every tower I climbed in the rain, every midnight page, every impossible budget—they were all attempts to clear the path, raise the antenna, clean the connectors so the signal could keep traveling a little farther into the dark.
And the personal channels—the Bible studies in our living room, the youth groups, the late-night texts to grieving parents—those were the repeaters God placed exactly where the terrain blocked the direct shot.
Now, at sixty-seven, the trace on the spectrum analyzer is remarkably clean again. There’s still some harmonic distortion from the limp I’ll always walk with, some background noise from regrets that haven’t fully quieted. But the fundamental is strong: love God, serve, build, repair, connect.
One day soon the final packet will arrive—“Well done, good and faithful servant”—and the transmitter here will go silent. But I’ve learned something tracing this signal all these years: the message doesn’t end when the local oscillator stops. It keeps propagating, bouncing off the ionosphere of eternity, refracting through the lives I was privileged to touch—through Leisa’s steady blue-eyed faith, through Joshua’s brief but blazing eighteen years—until it reaches every receiver God intended.
The boy from Buna who just wanted to know how the voices got inside the radio spent his life becoming one of those voices.
And by the grace that first beeped across a Texas sky in 1958 and never stopped calling my name, the signal is still strong, still clear, still traveling.
This is John Hargrove, over and out—for now.
John Hargrove Seeking Truth and Reality 