Financial Hardship and walk a mile in someone else's shoes

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First off I want to say that I have always believed in the saying "walk a mile in someone else's shoes" before you judge them. But it has really come home to me this year as we have struggled greatly with our debt. Today I got a call saying that we really needed to take care of our water bill. I did get behind on this by a couple of months but with payday being tomorrow I was already writing out a check for it as we spoke. Now here is the part about walking in someone elses shoes. In the past I used to say "How can they not pay their water bill as it is the cheapest bill that you have in comparison to other bills ex. car insurance, house payment, etc.". Well now I know. My son's car broke down and it costed $900 to fix so had to find the necessary funds to pay for that and we also have lots of medical debt that we will be paying off for many years. Anyway I also thought of this saying because the person on the phone made the comment to the effect that we could pay this bill when there are others out there that really can't. She is probably right to a point but at the same time she needs to walk in my shoes. This has been an extremely hard year for us. I got injured and had to have surgery to repair my arm and 3 days later both of my children were at the Mayo Clinic undergoing tests. I was off work for 10 weeks and both children were undergoing medical treatment which caused added expences to the family budget. I have been working really hard on getting us back on track financially - took on another job, trying to save more, spending less, trying to find things to do on the internet to make money, etc. So I just feel that we should not judge others unless we really know what they are going through. Just something I was thinking about today.