After nine straight hours of decorating, our floor was finally ready. The bathroom looked, smelled, and felt like an actual jungle. The lounge was dark and terrifying. One room was rigged for plastic spiders to drop creepily from the ceiling. It was Oktemberfest, an annual tradition of Smith-Traber Hall, one of the freshman dorms on campus, where students can come to experience a themed traversal of each floor. My fellow floormates and I had chosen “Jumanji” as our theme, and we were ready to dazzle!

As groups of students began coming onto our floor, we assumed our characters and played them faithfully: a lion, a monkey, a dinosaur, and myself as a wild man, straight from the jungle. Guys who didn’t want to act helped behind the scenes by starting the music or changing the lights on cue. We came together like a well-oiled machine, each man doing his part, and it was fulfilling to create something collectively. That night was long and exhausting, but so fun and so worth it.

Times like these help me realize the blessings and beauty of living in community. Even though each individual is unique, we united as a floor into one identity: a microcosm of the Body of Christ.