The following quotation is a direct steal from T Prinzi's blog from the Rabbit Room. It lit up the insides of my brain when I read it and can't seem to stop meditating on it:

We intersect with other's unfinished stories every day, and this should
cause us to be filled with grace toward one another. I think we’re
often like the taunting fairies in George MacDonald's
Phantastes: “Look at him! Look at him! He has begun a story without a
beginning, and it will never have any end! He! he! he! Look at him!”

It’s easy to forget that each of us is stumbling through an unknown land
with hardly the faintest clue what direction we’re heading in, and
it’s easy to taunt each other instead of encourage one another.

Which gives me a clue to a question I have been asking myself. When Jesus tells us to 'not judge' in Matthew 7, He follows that instruction with 'don't cast pearls before swine or give what is holy to dogs'. My question has been, what is judging then? Sounds like judging to me, to call someone a swine or a dog.

But there seems to be an enormous difference between discernment and being judgmental. So the George MacDonald thought above is pointing me toward this thought: I am discerning when I notice that someone is being foolish or simple or scornful or teachable. I am judging when I imagine for a second, and communicate it to any other, that I am never vulnerable in that same way. That it would be unlike me and impossible for me to commit that same sin.

Because I am an unfinished story. I have no certainty what the rest of my life will be like. And in great humility and compassion for the struggles of others, I need to consider that my life is in great peril of stumbling, too. Indeed, I have had overwhelming seasons of stumbling already.