While he was still in high school, Coston was given the opportunity to speak with four equine doctors, then go on the rounds with one of them. Coston had cheerfully told the group that he was about to graduate, but was soon cowed by the questions the doctor asked him as they completed the rounds. Coston got almost all of them wrong, and the veterinarian, Dr. Evers, was looking more and more displeased. Coston was crestfallen, thinking the day had been a disaster so far. "Honestly, Bruce," Evers told him after a few visits with patients, "I have some real concerns about your readiness for practice." Coston, confused, told him he'd gotten straight A's all through school. "You're kidding me, right?" Evers asked. He was silent for a moment, then asked Coston about his plans. "I'll be working at camp this summer again," Coston said. "Then I'm headed to Tennessee for college." Evers looked at him, then burst out laughing. Evers and the other doctors had taken "senior" to mean senior in college and had been aghast that an almost-college graduate couldn't answer their questions correctly. "With that piece of vital information, I have to say that you have handled yourself amazingly well," Evers told him.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
