Show Hospitality to Strangers (13:2)

• Invite a visitor from another community to arrive unannounced when the class is busy with some regular activity, such as drawing or reading individually. Give the children a few minutes to react on their own, but if no one spontaneously includes the visitor, you should. After just another few minutes, stop the activity and open a discussion of the children's own experience with being strangers. If you have one, share a story of "entertaining angels unawares," or explain the reference with the story from Genesis 18:1-8, among others. Take care not to confuse children who've been instructed by their parents to be wary of strangers.
  
  

Share Suffering (13:3)

• This behavior for imitation does not lend itself easily to role play, games, or arts and crafts. Neither is it easy to explain to children when read from either NRSV or KJV. Modern translations tend to extend the KJV's "as" to "as if," when the Greek suggests that the letter writer meant to point out that when one member of the community is imprisoned or abused, all members share in difficulty. You might ask a pair of siblings to talk about how it feels when one is in time out and unavailable for play, or discuss a situation when you've had to discipline the whole class. Again, the best approach may be to speak from your own experience, within the children's capacity to understand.
  
  

Honor Relationships (13:4)

• This behavior also requires interpretation into the children's world and is probably too difficult to read directly, where it speaks of marriage and the marriage bed. Scholars believe it may originally have addressed issues of imminent apocalypse and asceticism countering, as in the KJV, "Marriage is honorable in all." If you broaden the "honoring" to all kinds of relationships, however, you can draw family trees and friendship trees, and bring in the relationships your church may have with mission workers in other parts of the country or world.
  
  

Be Content with What You Have (13:5a-b)

• These two long clauses in either of the popular English translations spring from just six words in Greek, and the first (contained in one Greek word) isn't necessarily about money, as it can refer to silver or to idols made from it. Though children may lack significant experience with money, they certainly know about the risks of valuing things over people and relationships. Play marbles or some other "capture" game and discuss how you might turn the game into something more cooperative. Finish your discussion with part "c" of the verse, about Jesus' promise to be with us and always enough, and relate that to your own life.