Pokeman Game Should Be Avoided

Years ago a missionary friend of mine shared an experience that took place in the jungle. In light of the fact that there is a Pokeman game captivating many I share this story with you.

Bautista and Pokeman
Again, this has been posted previously, and is being reposted by request.

As missionaries working with the Yanomamö, I am constantly reminded that when it comes to spiritual matters, I am not the expert. Bautista was an ex-witchdoctor. He accepted the gospel of Jesus Christ many years ago when my parents first started working with his tribe back in the early 50s. Although still a young man when they arrived to his village, he was a witchdoctor of considerable fame. He had already attained to the highest level known as “ijiluwalewä, or “child eater,” because he could attack other villages in the spirit world stealing the souls of a child there, causing the child to die. These souls were given to the many cannibal spirits who were his accomplices in this “murder.” The soul would then be eaten by these demon cannibal spirits. Although having attained the highest he could go, by his own admission, he was being overwhelmed by the bondage he was under even before he heard about the saving power of the gospel, so once he clearly understood that Christ was the only way to be freed from this bondage, he accepted Christ’s claim on his life and his life has never been the same.
One of the times I was reminded of how much more the expert he is in spiritual matters happened one day a couple of years ago. We had been in the jungle many long weeks with no mail from home when the plane landed bringing us a package. I was excited as I took it home. “Look hon, a package from the Wauconda Free church” I gave her the package and she opened it up, she, as excited as I was. Enclosed was a book. Now that in itself was a big enough disappointment because I wanted some “real mail” like maybe a box of chocolates or something, but when I saw the cover, I was even more disappointed. It was a book on the pokeman cartoon characters. I am old school on cartoons (Bugs Bunny, road runner and their friends) and really don’t get into any of the new ones, especially ones that look as ugly as these did. Then we noticed there was also a letter enclosed with the book and we read it together. “Dear Mike,” it said…it seems the church was having a discussion about pokeman, with the church divided about this “toy.” So they were sending this book of all the pokeman characters to me asking me to have Bautista look at it and see what he thought about the characters.
Well, that was more interesting than just having a book of ugly cartoons for the boys, but to be honest, this was pretty low priority for me. As a matter of fact, Keila had been asking me for weeks to watch a video tape of these same cartoons, that our son Stephen really liked. She claimed his attitude really changed after watching these cartoons. I told her I would and really planned on watching it with him, but we are extremely busy in the jungle and I had not had a chance yet. But to be honest, I did not place much importance on this book. But one day while I was talking with Bautista, Keila remembered the book and ran upstairs to get it. She handed the book to me. Opening the book at random, showing him a picture I asked.  “What do you think of this?” He looked at it, and said, “Oh, I know this one!” He suddenly had my attention!
He went on, “Oh, this is a nasty little Jecula. (demon) It is always underfoot, bites, scratches, screeches and what not.” I looked at the page, and on the list of attributes, it said, “bites, scratches, screeches, claws…” and I forget what else, but it was as if Bautista was reading the page, and he does not read or speak one word of English. I figured that the first one could have been just a lucky guess, so I flipped the page to another picture and asked him about that one, again, he told me exactly what it’s attributes were. He did that over and over. So he made a believer out of me! About that time, Keila ran upstairs to call Stephen and he came down reluctantly, not wanting to hear anything and determined to not allow anyone to do anything to his cartoon tape. His frown slowly disappeared as he listened to Bautista describe the attributes of each cartoon that he knew. By the time Bautista was finished, Stephen went upstairs and brought his tape down and he and Keila destroyed it. So he made a believer out of Stephen as well.
 There were some he did not recognize, and he said. “There are so many demons, it is impossible for any one person to know them all.” Then he added, “tell the people from your churches, that if there are things that make them feel uncomfortable, it is probably not good. God’s Spirit will speak to them about what is right and wrong.” Your people need to learn to listen!”