Welcome to today's encouragement from Our Deli Bread.

I'm Sheridan Voizzi and I've called today's reading Smart Phone Compassion.

Was the driver late with your food?

You can use your phone to give him a one-star rating.

Did the shopkeeper treat you curtly? You can

write her a critical review. While smartphones enable us to shop, keep up with friends and more,

they have also given us the power to publicly rate each other. And this can be a problem.

Rating each other this way is problematic because judgments can be made without context. The driver

gets rated poorly for a late delivery due to circumstances out of his control. The shopkeeper

gets a negative review when she'd been up all night with a sick child. How can we avoid

rating others unfairly like this? By imitating God's character.

In Exodus chapter 34 verses 6 and 7, God describes himself as compassionate and gracious,

meaning he wouldn't judge our failures without context.

Slow to anger, meaning he wouldn't post a negative review after one bad experience.

Abounding in love, meaning his correctives are for our good, not to get revenge, and

forgiving of sin, meaning our lives don't have to be defined by our one-star days.

Since God's character is to be the basis of ours, we can avoid the harshness

smartphones enable by using ours as he would. In the online age, we can all rate others harshly.

May the Holy Spirit empower us to bring a little compassion today.

Today's scripture reading is from Exodus chapter 34, verses 1 to 8.

The Lord said to Moses, chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will

write on them the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke.

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