Judging Others

Here’s an interesting word—misophonia. It combines miso, a Greek word that means “hate, ” and phonia which means “voice, ” or in this case, “sound. ” Misophonia means “a sound you hate. ” And there are people for whom certain sounds cause an- ger, or disgust, or anxiety. The brain’s alarm system—the amygdala—does its thing and deep down in the brain there’s something that causes a person to perceive these sounds as a threat. That might not happen to you, but it happens to others.

This helps me to remember we’re not all the same, and we don’t all have the same issues. Transfer that over to a spiritual experience. Y ou might not ever have an issue with addiction, but there are people who do.

Y ou might not be able to understand why someone can be so flaky or so irresponsible, but maybe we need to remember that we as people are varied, and we have differing strengths and weaknesses. Someone gets drunk, someone gets caught in adultery, someone gets caught in an act of dis- honesty—the knee-jerk response is often to castigate or shun or shame or berate. But the Bible urges us to bear one another’s burdens, to help people up when we might just want to help them out the door.