A few months ago, a buddy of mine almost died. Let’s call him John (not his real name).
John’s in prison, one of the friends I made through my ministry, and one morning he moved a fellow inmate’s laundry from one bench to another. The other inmate, incensed, picked up a weight and threatened to bash in John’s head with it.
The story has a happy ending. John just said, “It’s too early for this,” put the laundry back where it had been, and left.
But the story got me thinking.
It would be so easy to judge the man who almost killed my friend over the placement of his laundry. What kind of psycho would do something like that?
But as I relayed this story to a friend of mine who’s worked in prison ministry for years, she said something interesting. Perhaps, she suggested, the aggressive inmate felt like everything else in his life was out of his control, and so placing his laundry on a certain bench was the only power left to him. When John moved said laundry, perhaps it felt to the other inmate like an invasion of the last fortress under his control.
Of course, that doesn’t excuse the other inmate’s actions. But seen in that light, it becomes hard to judge him. After all, I’ve never been in an environment as brutally dehumanizing as the one that this man lives in day-in and day-out. How can I get up on my high horse and pretend that I wouldn’t make the same decision if I was in his place and had lived his life?
But I feel like as a society, we do this all the time. We lecture other people about what they should or shouldn’t care about. I know that as I’ve consciously pulled back from the culture war, I can find myself tempted to sneer at people who are still angry over what this comedian says or what that small town’s mayor did: “How can you give your precious time and energy to that tempest-in-a-teapot?”
But I think these types of judgments miss the mark. The truth is that we all care about things. We all have boundaries that, if crossed, we will expend time and energy trying to set right. Some of those things might look silly from the outside. But if I got to step into your life for a day, I might find that the things that look foolish to care about from the outside might suddenly make a lot more sense.
What if we spent less time judging people for what they choose to care about, and more time trying to understand why they care?
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Excellent column and important message — timely for me because I've been on a judgment jag since Friday night when I sat at a table with a woman who engaged in what I considered to be toxically malicious gossip. But like the inmate in your story, I don't know what's going on with her, what boundaries she's trying to protect, what values she thought she was advocating for with her gossip. And as a practical matter, my judgment has zero impact on her but much impact on me as I mentally rehearse how I might set her straight next time. Hah. So thanks for this needed reminder that it's not compassionate and also a waste of my precious time and mental space to judge like I was doing.