This is Pastor Tim’s article which appeared in the Evening Leader on Tuesday, June 25, 2023
As I have told you many times, I grew up in the vast metropolis of Alger, OH. I was born in 1975, which means my formative years were in the 1980s. The 1980s was the greatest decade to grow up.
As all the Gen Xers in the crowd will attest, in the 1980s, we did not have cell phones, we did not have internet, and we did not even have cable TV. The only TV we had was an old RCA TV that ran off an antenna that gave us a picture that you could almost tell what it was. And it was not always reliable. Sometimes you got TV, sometimes you got digital snow. We did not live our lives around electronic devices because those devices did not do much in the 1980s.
But in place of all of these things, we had action figures. I still have a deep love of action figures to this day. I am so very sad that kids today don’t play with action figures anymore. My nephew, Jake, doesn’t seem too thrilled by them. Man, I loved action figures and I had a bunch of them. My favorite was GI Joe, but I also had a bunch of Star Wars and Masters of the Universe figures and vehicles.
Any of you from my generation remember the GI Joe line. Those vehicles were cool. They were detailed, had all kinds of moving parts, and you could fill them with a whole bunch of figures. I grew up with a huge backyard surrounded by fields. My most favorite thing to do was to go out and find the paths the water would run out of the fields and set up a GI Joe base. I would spend hours out there in one of those wash ways and have some incredible battles between GI Joe and Cobra.
The most common scenarios I would create with those action figures were usually rescue missions. One or two good guys would be in trouble or stranded and the rest of the team was launching a rescue mission that was always crazy complicated. I would even have the good guys rescuing bad guys out of dangerous situations.
Those action figures were a blast and I loved them so much. When I have a few minutes to sit at my desk, I often scroll through eBay and look at what those action figures I had out in the field playing with are worth today and wish I had left them in the boxes. I would be much closer to retirement if I had done that. But truth be told, those action figures taught me some important lessons.
First, the power of being one of the good guys. My hero characters were good because they did good things. They were always helping each other and forming friendships. Where today, the stories we tell are that you are good based on what you are. That isn’t how it works. We are good based on what we do. If you are not doing good, then you aren’t good. It is as simple as that. We can certainly have a debate on what is good, I am sure there are a range of definitions of that word, but at the end of the day, who you are is defined by what you do.
The second thing those action figures taught me is the power of imagination. No one ever sat me down and explained to me what they were or how they worked. No one ever created the scenarios for me nor helped me with the incredibly complicated rescue missions my characters went on. It was all about the stories and roles that I came up with on my own. It not only taught me to entertain myself but also taught me to show initiative. That is not to say that there weren’t times that mom threw me out of the house for a while so she could have some sanity, but when I had those times to go out in the fields with those action figures, I was on my own out there creating whatever scenario was going to play out.
To this day, playing with those action figures out in those fields for hours on end is one of my most treasured memories. I miss those simpler times when life ran at a manageable pace where I spent all summer covered in field dirt with a box or a bag full of action figures. I rescued a lot of heroes and made a lot of memories. I thank God I got to grow up in the 1980s.
While my parents still live in the house I grew up in, most of those fields have houses on them now. Most of the water drains through culverts so those wash ways don’t show up as much. But about once a year, I take a walk back through the few remaining fields just to allow myself to remember a time when the only pressure I felt was trying to figure out how to get one lost guy out of harm’s way and back with the group. In those days, I thought I had endless hours to figure it out. I know now that those hours were not endless and I miss them terribly.
I don’t remember when, but there was a day, late one summer, over 40 years ago, when I took that box or bag of action figures back into those fields one final time. At the time, I had no idea what I was leaving behind in those fields when I gathered those figures up and came in that night.
Pay attention, you never know when you are going to do something truly important for the last time.