Love one another instead of judge one another

I am ashamed. I glibly remark, “Oh, I am so good at judging others. Why can’t they just be like me?” I read, and I truly believe that “Judge not, lest you be judged.” And “You will be judged as you have judged others.” So I am ashamed that I take God’s word and treat it irreverently. I’m not really that funny, and that joke is not funny at all.
I heard a while back that one reason we judge is that we’re impatient with others. They’re not moving fast enough, or they’re not agreeing with us. When I broke that down and examined it, it turned out mostly accurate. How awful that we judge someone else by our own shortcomings. Rhonda tells me that we don’t know the whole story of someone else. There is a reason they’re acting the way they do. We only see the surface behavior and how it doesn’t measure up to our standards. It pays to wait and perhaps learn a bit more of a person before we write them off. That of course takes time, and we have to be willing to listen if we really want to know, “How’s it going?”
Since we don’t know a person’s whole story, we, or am I talking to myself, I should make my first response love. I should suspend the impatience with that person and elevate them, like God sees them. I should ask the second question after the “How’s it going?” Or know the person well enough to ask the deeper, more personal question, “How’s it going with your relationship with your daughter?” I know God smiles at us when we regale others the way Jesus did. I just read that we should spend less time defending our “religious” stand point and spend more time washing others’ feet. It’s hard to judge someone when you’re washing their feet. And it’s easy to love someone when you’ve put them before yourself. Help me love first and ask questions later.