I have been accused of many things in my life. Each time I’m always too stunned by the extremities of the accusations to defend myself, but there is one particular accusation I can never forget for as long as I live.

It is the day I was accused of witchcraft.

Was I flying in the air or casting spells? No.

Did I bewitch some poor soul and take their life? No.

‘Then what prompted the accusation?’ you may wonder.

Well, this particular story goes back a few years to when I was 12 years old. The year was 2015 and everyone was obsessed with mobile games.

You were either playing ‘Candy Crush’, ‘Subway Surfers’ or ‘Temple Run’. I had no interest in the first two but I was stuck on ‘Temple Run’.

‘What has that got to do with witchcraft?’

I’ll tell you.

Of course, being only 12 years old, I didn’t have a mobile device of my own, (Parents were much more sensible back then and didn’t give their children smart phones too early), but I lived with my grandparents and my grandpa had an iPad. So like a perfectly normal child, I downloaded ‘Temple Run’ onto his pad and enjoyed myself whenever he left his pad unattended.

I wasn’t in it alone, my brother also joined me in my witchcraft.

Up till that point, my grandfather had never bothered to check what apps had been installed on his iPad so my brother and I were never caught…until we were.

Now if you dig into your memory archives, you’ll remember that once you open the ‘Temple Run’ app, there was a neat little message at the menu;

“Take the Idol if you dare!”

Naturally, my brother and I had never once thought twice about it, but when my grandfather opened his pad one day and say this strange, new app and it’s evil message, he was instantly horrified.

I still remember the way he yelled mine and my brother’s names. We had never heard him yell before so we were very nervous.

Entering his room, we saw him standing, still half dressed from work and holding his iPad in his hand. He didn’t even look at us when we entered. He was probably still trying to figure out where he went wrong in his parenting.

We both stood silently, thinking that he was going to scold us for the numerous games we had installed without permission (yes, I admit it was more than one). Imagine our surprise when he holds the pad out to us with the Temple Run menu open and shining brightly on the screen.

“Read what they wrote there.” He instructed.

At this point, we were both very confused but we read it anyway. Once we were done, my grandfather looked us both in the eyes one after the other and asked us with a straight face, “When did you start worshipping idols?”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

I didn’t even know if I should laugh or not, my mind froze and my tongue went numb. Luckily for me, my brother came to the rescue. He assured our worried grandfather that we had not actually committed our lives to the devil.

Grandpa wasn’t buying it. He insisted that we were trying to practice witchcraft and when all persuasions from my brother were ignored, he led us back to Christ – again, and told us to delete the app.

We obeyed.

Ever since that day, I couldn’t play Temple Run without laughing to myself a little.

The game may not be so popular anymore, but the memory lives on.