Thanks for joining us for today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread.

I'm Kirsten Holmberg, and I'm glad to share today's reading with you that I titled

The Baggage Activity.

Karen, a middle school teacher, created an activity to teach her students how to better understand

one another.

In the baggage activity, students wrote down some of the emotional weights they were carrying.

The notes were shared anonymously, giving the students insight into each other's hardships,

often with a tearful response from their peers. The classroom has

since been filled with a deeper sense of mutual respect among the young teens, who now have a

greater sense of empathy for one another. Throughout the Bible, God has nudged his people to treat

one another with dignity and show empathy in their interaction with others. As early in the

history of Israel as the book of Leviticus, God pointed the Israelites toward empathy, especially in

their dealings with foreigners. He said to love them as themselves because they too had been foreigners in Egypt and knew that hardship

intimately. Sometimes the burdens we carry make us feel like foreigners, alone and misunderstood,

even among our peers. We don't always have a similar experience to draw on, as the Israelites did

with the foreigners among them. Yet we can always treat

those God puts in our paths with the respect and understanding that we ourselves desire. Whether a

modern-day middle schooler, an Israelite, or anything in between, we honor God when we do.

Today's Our Daily Bread devotional scripture reading is from Leviticus, Chapter 19, verses 32 through 34.

Stand up in the presence of the aged.

Show respect for the elderly and revere your God.

I am the Lord.

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