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Message: <blockquote data-quote="adembroski3" data-source="post: 1608076" data-attributes="member: 18909">I met my friend Kevin when I was 5 years old. In Jr. High, the two of us got into gaming through a mutual friend, and we started playing. Around the same time, we both "found Jesus" (I'm not sure why... it was kind of on a whim. We both decided it was time to check out religion and see if it was cool. We got into it). After a while, our youth pastor, who was an awesome guy who'd actually gamed with us twice, was fired (interesting thing about babtist churches is that the congregation makes the personel decisions. Babtist congregations are a notoriously fickle lot), and the regular pastor took up double duty.Now, we had both liked this guy as the regular pastor. He was a good speaker, never seemed over bearing, but had strong leadership qualities. He was sincere and level headed... everything a babtist pastor was not supposed to be<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /> Anyways, the guy found out about our gaming (we didn't hide it, really, because the last guy had been very tolorant of it) and the storm began.Now, I could understand his issues with me listening to Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg at the time. I could even accept that he wasn't happy about my Metallica tape. I wasn't even all that bothered when he came to me about my habit of listening to Garth Brooks (yes, I have very diverse musical tastes... my two favorites are rap and traditional Irish drinking songs), but when he came to me about gaming, I was shocked. I had no idea at the time that there was any stigma at all connected too it. My mother had been pleased by my getting into it, honestly, she thought I was too much of a jock (I'm not only a gamer, but I love soccer and American football. Football is my first love, but gaming is my mistress. Soccer is weekend p***y).Anyways, I listened to his arguments, and as much as I respected the guy, I just couldn't put the logic together. I explained to him that it was far from satanic, I explained that the spells were fake, and even asked him if I used Christianity as the base religion if that would make him feel better<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /> Nothing would make him budge. We were at an impass, and he left. Next sunday I saw Kevin and found out that he had been visited by the pastor as well... a more successful conversation. In fact, Kevin had already trashed ALL of his role playing stuff... including Hero Quest (god I loved that game!).Kevin and I grew apart over the early High School years. We still got together to play football after school, but we didn't speak much. It was more or less due to our circle of friends being the same. Eventually I moved from Prescott Valley, Az to Fargo, ND, and didn't speak with him for a while.A few weeks ago I decided to call another friend in Arizona and Kevin happened to be hanging out with him at the time. The two of us talked for a long time and patched up old disagreements. He'll be stopping through Fargo this summer on his way to a business meeting in Minneapolis (it's a tad out of his way, but 200 miles or so shouldn't stop a 21 year friendship). Last thing he asked me is if I was still gaming. I said yes. He said good, have something ready to go when I get there.</blockquote>

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