Eyes closed, I stood with my head bowed, listening to the prayer over the meal. Then I heard a suspicious rustling noise beside me. What is that? I wondered.

I cracked open one eye and peered to my right. Everyone on that side of the room had their eyes closed, obediently listening to the prayer. Then I looked to my left—and saw my cousin surreptitiously sliding the mushrooms off his plate and placing them inside his napkin. What?!

I quickly glanced away and squeezed my eyes shut, armed with this incriminating knowledge. He was trying to get out of eating his mushrooms! I knew that he disliked mushrooms, but that was no excuse for trying to hide them in his napkin during the prayer. I didn’t like mushrooms either at the time (I have since changed my views on this subject), and I wasn’t about to let him get out of eating his mushrooms if I still had to eat mine.

Just you wait, I thought with a satisfied smile, secure in my 5-year-old righteous indignation. You thought you were so clever—but you’re not going to get away with it!

When the prayer was over, I glanced over at my cousin and saw that he was attempting to look entirely innocent—despite the obvious lack of mushrooms on his plate, and the slide marks of creamy sauce that made a visible trail from his steak toward the napkin.

“He hid his mushrooms in his napkin during the prayer!” I announced triumphantly, pointing at my now crestfallen cousin. Having made this announcement, I stood confidently in my self-righteousness and waited to see what would happen. Surely my cousin would now be punished for his misdeed. He deserved it—right? And perhaps I would even be praised for turning in the sinner. My vigilance would be richly rewarded.

Well, my vigilance was rewarded—just not in the way that I had intended.

After my announcement, my dad turned to me and asked a question that quickly turned my triumph into an uncomfortable sense of foreboding.

“How do you know?”

Oops.

I had not thought of that. In order for me to discover that my cousin was stashing his mushrooms, I had to have opened my eyes during the prayer—which I wasn’t supposed to do.

I felt very righteous at the time; I saw my cousin doing something wrong, and I wanted him to be punished for it as he deserved. But in order to catch him in the act, I also disobeyed my parents by opening my eyes during the prayer—which they had always taught me not to do.

Looking back on this incident, a passage in Matthew 7 comes to mind—“Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment you judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” (verses 1-2). The passage goes on to say that before trying to pull out the mote that is in our brothers’ eye, we should first consider the beam that is within our own eye. Before we pass judgment on someone else, we should first look at ourselves to see where we are going wrong.

In this instance, both my motivation and my means of acting on that motivation were off-base. I had intended to incriminate my cousin for his wrongdoing, but in order to do that, I had to disobey as well. And I was definitely not acting out of love. I had caught him doing something wrong and was not about to let him get away with it—but to accomplish that, I had to break God’s law of love at the same time.

It can be so easy to see someone else doing something wrong and recognize it as a real problem. But how easily do we recognize these same problems within ourselves? Romans 2:1-3 tell us that when we judge others for doing something we see as obviously wrong, we are condemning ourselves in the process—“for thou that judgest doest the same things” (verse 1). Oftentimes, the things we are most critical of in others are the things we ourselves struggle with but may not see. They may be perfectly obvious to someone else, but we are often blind to our own shortcomings.

Needless to say, our respective parents took care of our disobedience with the appropriate disciplinary action. At the time, I was rather annoyed that I had actually incriminated myself while self-righteously trying to get my cousin in trouble. But looking back on it, I appreciate the lesson that my parents were trying to teach me.

If you see someone doing something that you think is wrong, check yourself first. Ask: What is my motivation? Am I acting out of love—or self-righteousness? Do I struggle with the same problem myself?

Whenever I am faced with a situation like this, I try to remember this lesson from the dinner table. I learned that just because someone else is wrong, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are completely right.

And after all of that, we still had to eat our mushrooms.