Woe to you, Pharisee.

I was talking to a friend over coffee and cupcakes this morning who had recently spent all summer working at a camp. She talked about an "exercise" (for lack of better words) they did called a Leper Call. Basically, every staff member gave their leper call to the campers. That thing they felt made them unclean, that needed to be announced as sort of a warning to those in the area. She confided to me her own leper call and in turn I told her mine.

In talking through my specific leper call I noted to my friend that (no surprise here) a lot of my sin manifests itself through my eating patterns. I said, frustrated, "I have so many rules for how I eat that it's impossible to not go to bed feeling like a failure. I either ate too many carbs or calories, ate sugar, didn't eat organic, didn't eat whole wheat everything... whatever. I am setting myself up for failure with all of these rules... and I feel like that's directly related to my relationship with God."

That's when my friend said to me that it sounded like I was making rules to add to the Gospel... just like the Pharisees. The Pharisees couldn't accept that the Gospel was enough... they had to earn it, too. Then they judged those who didn't adhere to those rules.

As hard as it is to hear from someone that you're behaving like a Pharisee, it's even harder when you know it's true. I have NO idea how to even begin to retrain my thinking... but for now I'm going to take every though captive and not try and hold myself to a standard to which God doesn't hold me.