Once, I silently condemned a friend for what I thought was a lack of love.

We hadn’t seen each other for a long time. A year and a half earlier she had gotten married, and now she was telling me about her new life: settling into a new family, adjusting to the rhythms of marriage, inventing tender nicknames with her husband, going to concerts together. It all sounded warm and alive. And then, almost casually, she said:

“I hate cleaning the apartment. I don’t need perfect order, and my husband knows how to do everything himself.”

I said nothing out loud, but inside I began to judge her. A husband comes home from work tired and hungry, I thought, and she… Perhaps she doesn’t like cooking either?

“I don’t like cooking either,” she said, as if reading my mind. “There’s always food in the fridge—you can heat it up. Besides, my husband cooks much better than I do.”

“That’s it,” I concluded silently. “She only thinks about herself. She’s lazy. If there were more love in her, love would overcome the laziness.”

I must have betrayed my thoughts with my face. She lowered her eyes and grew quiet, as though she herself felt guilty for not giving her husband enough attention. Then she added softly, almost in a whisper:

“We lost a child six months ago.”

And suddenly the shame was mine.

I had truly judged her—decided that she didn’t know how to love, that her love was insufficient. But the truth was far simpler and far heavier: she did not have the physical or emotional strength for everyday chores because she was still living through a devastating loss. And yet she was loving her husband as best she could—with kind words, with a smile, with tenderness. She was giving as much love as she had, and sometimes more than she had.

In that moment, a painful realization came to me: it is sinful—almost criminal—to be an accountant of someone else’s love. To tell others how they should love, to measure and compare, to decide that one person loves more and another less. Love is the most sacred and genuine thing a person possesses. But its measure and its language are different for everyone.

I remembered the Gospel story of the widow’s two mites. Perhaps the Pharisees watching her drop those tiny coins into the treasury also thought she was giving too little, that her love and devotion were insufficient. And yet Christ saw what they could not.

That day, God taught me how dangerous it is to count other people’s inner wealth. How much wiser it is to look at our own. And how important it is, whenever possible, to add to the divine treasury—not with judgments, but with compassion.