by Rita Klundt

This afternoon, I accepted a challenge to write a poem using an acrostic format.  The words love and beauty came to my mind, but those two words were crowded out because of some difficult circumstances. Avoidable circumstances. Someone told a lie. A big fat lie. So, here is my answer to the acrostic challenge:

Deceitfulness

Do not lie
Everyone tempted – Everyone warned
Calamity only deferred
Embellishment becomes necessity
Integrity blemished then redefined
Trust destroyed
Facts omitted or misaligned
Unscrupulous souls enjoy
Love exploited
Niceness tooled for betrayal
Everyone loses
Soiled legacy
Sin. Because to call deceitfulness by any other name would be a lie.

And this evening, I was still spewing anger because of that same lie. Adding self-righteousness to anger didn’t help. My stomach still churned. A passage I read from my Bible did help. 1 John 4:7 tells us to “love one another: for Love is of God.”

The person who told the big fat lie today probably knows about God, but doesn’t know Him. That could explain a lot!

My goal: To gaze at something beautiful before I decide on a topic for my next acrostic poem, and to remember what it says in 1 John 4:11. “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.”