Sunday Games

This past Sunday I was thinking about what my Sundays were like when I was growing up. It struck me that now, as a college student, I cherish Sundays because I can relax and rejuvenate a bit before starting another week. However, as a kid, it seemed like my three brothers and I couldn’t stand Sundays because Sunday was the day when we were forbidden to do anything fun. No friends, no hockey in the street, no going to our clubhouse in the woods, no fighting. Well actually, I guess there wasn’t technically a rule against fighting. You see my parents’ foremost rule for Sunday was that all activities had to be Church-based. Therefore, an activity was only deemed appropriate if we could verify to them that the activity somehow related to a scripture story or eternal principle.

With this as the only proviso to our Sunday games, we soon discovered that the scriptures, particularly the Old Testament, actually provided several ideas for games conducive to roughhousing and fighting. The first game we developed was called Stone the Prophets. In this game, one of my brothers would stand on a chair or couch and try to read a section of the scriptures that called the people to repentance. The rest of us would stand back a few feet and armed with Nerf balls, rolled up socks, and eventually pool noodles we would try to hit the prophet and keep him from prophesying. During all of this, we would yell at the prophet saying things like, “we don’t want your false prophecies” or “we are the children of Abraham, and you come here to teach us you fool!”

Another Sunday classic was entitled “Hold to the Rod”. This game was played exclusively on the stairs that came up from the basement. The object of the game was to reach the top of the stairs by holding to the banister and avoiding the “temptations” of the devil. To represent the temptations of the devil, one brother would punch and shove those attempting to climb the staircase and pull them away from the rod. This game ended when my little brother Taylor got the idea of sprinting up the staircase and attempt to bypass the temptations all together. As he ran up the stairs, I kicked him in the head, causing him to fall all the way down the stairs and put his head through the wall. While this incident persuaded my father to forbid us from ever playing this game again, I believe my brother Taylor walked away with a valuable and physical object lesson that prophets have stressed for generations: there are no shortcuts in the gospel or quick routes to the Tree of Life.