FIRST, A FULL DISCLOSURE. My first jobs at the Christian Science Publishing Society involved marketing research in support of The Christian Science Monitor's advertising and circulation sales activities, as well as editorial product evaluation. I came to the work as a lifelong Christian Scientist and a longtime subscriber and reader. Also, as an unrepentant news junkie and unabashed fan of the Monitor.
Whenever I met with advertisers, ad agencies, media research suppliers, and research colleagues from other news organizations, it was a privilege to represent such a respected name in journalism. But my dream job? I wanted to be a Monitor foreign correspondent. I wasn't long out of journalism graduate school and had worked as an editor and writer for nonprofit organizations in Chicago. It's one thing to dream of filing dispatches from Africa, though, and another to feel a calling and relentlessly follow it. I did, however, feel called to care about Africa and Africans, to pray about the global human family and its health and welfare, and that's how my deeper engagement with the Monitor has developed.
This line of evolving engagement has paralleled my growing appreciation for the Bible's story of Jonah. In the first phase of my love of the story, Jonah was a vivid tale of adventure. When I was a kid, the image of a fish that swallowed a man whole probably tripled my usual attention span in Sunday School class. A fish big enough to inhabit for three days was a truly cool thing to talk about and draw, using some radical-for-those-times colored pencils that our teacher brought to class. But my Sunday School teacher's message was simple and Christian. Obeying God is a good and right thing to do.
