The games we played when I was growing up were quite different from those children play these days. For one thing, we usually played actual physical games rather than computerized games. We had never even seen a computer or a cell phone back then, so we certainly didn’t play on them.
One of our favorite games was one we played at church almost every Sunday evening, when the weather permitted. It was a game called “freeze tag.” We normally played it on the front lawn of the church. We played several variations on this game. The one I remember best was where we chose one person to be “It.” The “It” person chased everyone else around as he/she tried to tag them and shout “Freeze!” The tagged person then had to stand in place without moving until he was tagged by another person who shouted “Unfreeze!”
The objective of the game was for the “It” person to freeze everyone else before someone else could unfreeze them. In one version of the game, we had a safe base. That was usually our big brick church sign. If you could get to it and touch it without getting tagged first, you were safe, or off limits from being tagged. If everyone made it to the base, “It” lost the game.
We had a large church cemetery right beside the church. Sometimes, in the longer daylight days of summer, we played tag in the cemetery. One of the taller upright tombstones served as our home base. This version of the game usually ended abruptly when one of our parents came out and scolded us for playing in the cemetery. Sometimes that came with a lecture about having respect for the deceased. Running on top of the graves was not thought to be proper. Sometimes we tried to run around them, rather than over them, but you know what they say about the shortest distance between two points.
One of my first pastorates came while I was still a young seminary student. The church had a new cemetery. They had erected a chain-link fence around a large area which they had set apart for the cemetery. Because the cemetery was new, only about a half-dozen or so people had been buried in it. All of those were on one end and the rest of the fenced in area was vacant.
Our small church did not have a youth minister, so since I was not much older than the youth, I unofficially became the pastor/youth minister. I was still young enough to play games with them, and one of our favorites was football. We didn’t play freeze tag, but we did play tag football.
Guess where the largest flat and unobstructed area of the church was located? Even I, as the pastor, saw no harm in playing football in the cemetery as long as we were not playing on top of the grave area. Most of the other adults did not share my opinion. The dressing down this young pastor and our youth received reminded me of the scolding I had gotten as a child for playing freeze tag in the cemetery. Once again, I was informed that we should have respect for the deceased.
You know what? The adults were right…in both cases. We certainly should have respect for the deceased. In fact, we should have respect for the living, too. I’m afraid far too many of us today, young and old, do not show a proper amount of respect. A good dose of being thoughtful toward others, in a cemetery or wherever, certainly would not do us any harm.
Bill King can be reached at bkpreach@yahoo.com.
