The Baggage Activity

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. He 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. Let's pray. God, You know the weight in our hearts, and You graciously unburden us when we put our trust in You. Help us to offer care and compassion toward those in our lives. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Today's encouragement was provided by Our Daily Bread Ministries.