When I was a little girl, I went to my first circus. There, before my awestruck eyes, were three rings in full action—performing animals in one, and acrobats leaping and flying through the air in another. What interested me most, though, was taking place in the third ring. A girl and a boy were flinging brightly colored missiles, which, after they had crossed the ring, turned and returned to the very hands that had flung them. No matter which direction they were thrown, the things curved and came back swiftly to the young performers, who would catch and fling them again.

I watched in amazement. What made those things change their course and circle right back to where they began? “They are boomerangs,” someone beside me said. It was the first time I had ever heard the word, and I tucked it away in my young mind.

I’ve heard the word many times since, of course, and I’ve also seen the principle behind it play out in life. In fact, life itself is a boomerang. Everything we do comes back to us, sometime, somewhere. God’s Word says, “Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap.” Every word or action we fling out comes back some day.

It is uncanny how a boomerang circles and returns to the one who threw it out, and that is the way it is with the spiritual law of retribution. Whatever a man throws out into the world, the same shall return to him. If he throws out the bread of kindness, kindness will come to him; if he throws out a curse, a curse will come upon him. Whether good or bad, it will return to us, and it often gains momentum as it does.

Sometimes it happens immediately, like the case of a mother who I overheard in a supermarket, speaking to her child in irritable, impatient tones. When the child railed back in the same tone of voice, I thought, That mother’s boomerang is coming back to her.

Other times it may take years. I once met another mother who asked me to pray with her for her grown son, whose life had gone all wrong. “At the time, it was so different,” she told me. “When he was small, I gave no thought to how my actions were affecting his values. I thought I was just having fun. But when I heard prison doors close behind my boy, I couldn’t help but think that what I was really hearing was the distant echo of my own life.” Her child’s life, like metal when it’s molten, had flowed into the mold and hardened there. The boomerang had come back.

One morning I visited two women in the same hospital. One room was filled with flowers and cards and all sorts of beautiful little gifts from friends and acquaintances. The sufferer was surrounded by those thoughtful gestures of love and concern, kindness, and sympathy. That was a reflection of her life, for she had sown love and thoughtfulness into others’ lives throughout the years, and now it was all coming back to her in her hour of need as she lay sick in that hospital room.

In a room down the hall, another woman lay alone. Bitterness, resentment, and suspicion were etched on every feature of her face. Selfishness had ruined her life. Still as self-absorbed, suspicious, and critical as she had always been, there she lay with her face turned to the wall—a wall as hard and cold and bare as the ones she had built around herself all her life. Now she was alone as she faced death.

Oh, what a difference there was in those two rooms! The boomerang had come back to both women, but in very different ways.

“Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom, for with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you.” Anyone who lives unselfishly, caring for and lifting the burdens of others, easing their pain, and helping to supply their needs, surely will see that boomerang come back in the form of blessings some day!