The Lost-and-Found Narrative

The Lost-and-Found Narrative, the most common in the dataset, depicts Jesse&s;s reconnection with others or with God after a period of psychological tension. Drawing on Lewis Rambo&s;s process model of conversion, the chapter traces how exemplars function as thresholds from crisis to belonging. Religious and spiritual subsets show reconnection through testimony, prayer, and community, often coded in masculine terms. The narrative thus illuminates how some Gen Zers imagine “being found” through mediated experiences of conversion and through an exemplarism inflected by gender.