Favour Odenyi is a high school senior in San Francisco who enjoys coding and fixing bicycles. She’s also a fairly new reader of the Monitor because of an assignment for a youth leadership program.

At first, Favour wasn’t thrilled. She admits feeling “numb” to the news. And she’s hardly unique. A poll conducted last year by Media Insight Project found that while a majority of 16-to-40-year-olds read the news daily, only 32% enjoy it.

As she started her assignment, Favour found reading the Monitor challenging. The war in Ukraine had just broken out, and world events were confusing. But slowly, she started to feel something else: hope. She was intrigued by an effort to preserve old-growth forests and by an Army chaplain who encourages soldiers to be ethical leaders. She felt drawn in by an article about an Eritrean family who struggled to get asylum in Israel but eventually found a place to live in Canada with a Jewish family. Favour found she wasn’t content to just read the news; she felt impelled to act.

There was a boy in her Advanced Placement calculus class who was struggling with their group project and hardly participating. “I decided to see if what I was reading was actually useful,” recounts Favour. Instead of just keeping to herself as she normally does, she offered to help after class. Then they sat together at lunch and chatted. “I was putting into practice what I was learning in the Monitor,” she says. “Like, just open up a little bit, just the same way that family opened up to complete strangers. It was definitely a big step on my end.”

Favour wrote about her experience reading the Monitor in an award-winning essay sponsored by DiscoveryBound, a national youth leadership program for Christian Scientists. “A transformation was happening,” Favour writes, “one that enabled me to explore how I could apply the values gained from reading the news, in my daily life.” You can read Favour’s full essay here.