Let me say it louder for the folks in the back pew: what they eat don’t make you shit.
Somebody’s grandmama said that decades ago, and baby, it still preaches.
So let’s talk about it. Because some of y’all have made a whole ministry out of monitoring who other people love. You’ve got binoculars on somebody else’s bedroom and blinders on your own mess. And I have questions.
How Is Their Love Affecting Your Household?
I’ll wait.
Did somebody else’s wedding rearrange your furniture? Did two men holding hands at the grocery store change what’s in your cart? Did a woman loving her wife reach into your kitchen and season your food wrong?
No? Then why are you carrying it like it’s yours?
Their happiness is not a bill that arrives at your address. Their love is not a lien on your house. Nobody’s relationship is raising your children — you are. Nobody’s joy is pouring your drink, planning your week, or deciding how you live. That’s your job. And if you’re honest, some of y’all have been so busy supervising other people’s lives that yours is sitting unattended, unwatered, and undone.
Now Let’s Flip It
Let’s ask the question the other way, since we’re being fire and honest today.
How is their life affecting anyone outside their own household?
Not “how does it make you feel.” Not “what does it stir up in you.” I’m asking: is their marriage taking money out your account? Is their relationship showing up on your job performance review? Is their love story changing your grocery bill, your gas prices, your blood pressure medication? Did their joy break into your house and rearrange the furniture?
No. Because it can’t. Because it doesn’t touch anything outside of their own four walls unless you drag it there.
Now flip it one more time, and sit with this one: how has your judgment affected them?
Because that one has receipts.
The Brutally Honest Part
Here’s what closed minds have actually cost this community — not feelings, facts:
In 2025, over a third of LGBTQ+ young people seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year, and that number climbed even higher — 40% — among transgender and nonbinary youth. This is not because of who they are. The research is direct about that: LGBTQ+ young people are placed at heightened risk for suicidality because of how they are mistreated and stigmatized — not because of their identity itself.
And here’s the part that should stop every judgmental church mother, uncle, and keyboard theologian in their tracks: young people who experienced bullying, discrimination, or attempts to change who they are were more than three times as likely to attempt suicide compared to peers who weren’t targeted that way.
Flip it, and the data flips too. LGBTQ+ young people living in accepting communities attempted suicide at less than a third of the rate of those in unaccepting ones.
Read that again. Acceptance isn’t just kindness. It is, statistically, the difference between life and death for a whole generation of young people. Your judgment is not a neutral opinion sitting quietly in your spirit — it is showing up in ER rooms, in youth shelters, in headstones.
So don’t tell me judging somebody’s love life is harmless. Don’t tell me it’s “just your beliefs.” Beliefs don’t have a body count. Yours might.
What Surviving Does to a Person
Here’s what the research shows instead, and it’s still remarkable: people who live through minority stress — through rejection, discrimination, being made to explain and defend their existence over and over — don’t just survive it. Psychologists who study LGBTQ+ resilience have found that many people build real, documented psychological strength through that adversity — the kind of resilience that comes specifically from having to fight for your own wholeness.
Think about what that means. The community you’ve spent energy judging has, in large part, had to become masters of empathy just to survive you. They know what it feels like to be misunderstood, so they extend understanding. They know what it feels like to be shut out, so they build community wider, not narrower. That’s not a stat I’m going to dress up with a fake percentage — it’s just true, and it’s been true since the beginning of time. Struggle refines people. And a lot of this community has been refined by fire they didn’t start.
Meanwhile — where’s the data on what judgment refined in you?
Your Opinion Doesn’t Outrank Their Own Life
Let’s get to the real question, the one underneath all of it: how does your opinion of my life carry more weight than my own opinion of my own life?
Whose eyes are on this life every single day? Whose heart beats through the decisions? Whose relationship with God is actually being lived out, prayed through, wrestled with in the quiet? Not yours. Theirs.
You don’t get a vote on somebody else’s joy just because you watched it happen. Spectating is not the same as stakeholding. And an opinion formed from the outside, with none of the context, none of the prayer, none of the lived experience — that opinion does not outrank the person who’s actually living the life.
Their opinion of their own life was formed in the room. Yours was formed from the doorway.
Judgment Is Not a Fruit of the Spirit
Show me where judgment made you kinder. Show me where condemnation made you more patient. Show me the moment your side-eye produced love, joy, peace, gentleness, or self-control.
You can’t. Because judging people has never once made anybody a better individual. It just makes you busy. Busy doing a job that was never posted, never offered, and never assigned to you.
Here’s the part that stings: judgment is often a costume. We dress it up in scripture and call it a standard, but a lot of times it’s just fear, discomfort, or somebody else’s opinion we inherited and never examined. You didn’t pray about it. You just repeated it.
And Let’s Talk About God, Since You Brought Him Up
You cannot build intimacy with God while auditioning for His job.
Every hour you spend cataloging somebody else’s “sin” is an hour you didn’t spend in your own healing, your own prayer life, your own becoming. God asked you to love people. Point blank. Period. He did not ask you to pre-screen them, grade them, or run background checks on their hearts.
If your walk with God has become mostly about who you’re against, chiiile, that’s not a relationship — that’s a picket line. And you can’t picket your way into His presence.
The truth? Some of us hide behind judging others because it’s easier than facing ourselves. It’s easier to point at somebody’s love life than to sit with our own loneliness. Easier to condemn their joy than to ask why we haven’t found ours. Judgment is a distraction dressed up as devotion.
To My LGBTQ+ Family Reading This
You are not a debate topic. You are not somebody’s sermon illustration. You are not a problem to be solved.
You are whole people with whole lives — love, laughter, grief, growth, faith, and everything in between. And anybody who reduced you to one thing was never really seeing you.
Your existence doesn’t require a permission slip. Your joy doesn’t need a co-signer. And your relationship with God — if you want one — is between you and Him, not you, Him, and a committee.
Sit In It
Before you close this tab, sit with these:
Whose life have you been managing that was never yours to manage? What could you build with that energy if you brought it home? And when’s the last time your judgment of somebody else actually drew you closer to God — not louder, not more righteous-feeling, but closer?
And the hardest one: if your opinion of somebody’s life has never once saved them, fed them, or held them — what exactly has it been doing this whole time?
Because at the end of the day, we all answer for our own plate.
And what they eat? Don’t make you shit.
Mind your plate. Tend your garden. Love your people — all of them.
I said what I said.
— Coach Chanel G.
Sources: The Trevor Project, 2025 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People.
Leave a Reply