Celebrating Diversity
Today’s devotional
A classroom contains more human experience than any one set of examples can represent. Languages, family histories, places, traditions, and ways of seeing the world enter with the learners. Receiving that richness begins with the conviction that a person’s background is worthy of accurate attention and respectful curiosity.
In Athens, Paul speaks of one Creator who gives life to all and of a shared human origin. Revelation pictures worship offered by a multitude from many peoples and languages. Common belonging does not make difference disappear. These passages invite gratitude for humanity’s breadth within the life and care of God.
Celebrating difference requires more than collecting interesting customs. A story deserves its context, and a community deserves to be represented as complex and living. Choose materials that show ordinary life, thought, creativity, and contribution. Avoid allowing one festival, food, or famous person to stand for an entire people.
Students can choose whether and how to share their own experiences. Some will welcome an invitation; others may prefer to listen. Respect that freedom. A learner should be able to belong without becoming the classroom’s representative for a culture or answering questions they did not volunteer to address.
Examine one part of your curriculum for an opportunity to broaden the human story it tells. Seek an accurate resource and ask what it helps learners understand. Let gratitude lead toward deeper knowledge. In Christ, we can receive one another with a welcome that honors both our shared dignity and the particular lives through which that dignity is expressed.
Adapted from Original devotion 51: Celebrating Diversity in Nurturing Hearts & Minds by Dr. R. C. Titus.
Read the Scripture
Open each passage and read slowly. Notice what these words reveal about God and the life before you.
Acts 17:24-28 · WEBU
24The God who made the world and all things in it, he, being Lord of heaven and earth, doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands.
25He isn’t served by men’s hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he himself gives to all life and breath and all things.
26He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth, having determined appointed seasons and the boundaries of their dwellings,
27that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.
28‘For in him we live, move, and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’
Revelation 7:9-10 · WEBU
9After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no man could count, out of every nation and of all tribes, peoples, and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, dressed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.
10They cried with a loud voice, saying, “Salvation be to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
Pause and respond
For reflection
Does this representation help students encounter a complex human community or only a simplified image of it?
A practice for today
Choose one curriculum resource that can broaden a topic’s perspectives. Check its accuracy and context, and invite students to respond without requiring personal disclosure or cultural representation.
A prayer
Creator of every people, enlarge our gratitude for the human family. Help me teach with accuracy and respect, honoring both common dignity and particular experience. Give students freedom in what they share, and guide our curiosity toward deeper understanding, generous welcome, and love. Amen.
Your place is remembered in this browser. No account needed.