I love the rich adjectives in The Message Bible.
Check out Matthew 7:1-5, one of my favorites:
“Don’t pick on people, jump on their failures, criticize their faults – unless of course you want the same treatment. That critical spirit has a way of boomeranging.”
Boomeranging! I love that word. And it is so powerful when speaking to children about the way they treat others.
The tricky thing about sprititually “boomeranging” yourself is that our critical spirit doesn’t always come back to bite us while we’re watching and waiting. Instead it can come back and smack us in the head when we least expect it. So I guess you could watch and wait for your negative attitude to be returned, but boy that’s stressful. Instead, let’s just be nice, and we won’t have to be on constant look-out for the closest boomerang. That Jesus guy sure knew what He was talking about, even in our “contemporary language”!
