Clique

My freshman year at Mississippi State University was spent in survival mode.  I was enrolled as an architecture student, and each of us had been told to expect failure amongst our peers.  In fact, I can now say that most of us first year students were in survival mode.  It was daunting, and at times, really frightening.

At the same time, I was living in the dorm with a stranger who was terribly homesick.  Though he was much more outgoing and friendly than I was, he missed his family to the point of traveling home at every opportunity which in turn left me back in Starkville all alone.

Education was my second choice as a major, and by the time I'd reached the end of my freshmen year in Architecture, I was ready to bail.  I remember meeting with the Associate Dean about this, and he advised me to stick it out for one more semester.

A few weeks into my sophomore year, I was approached one Sunday afternoon while working at my drawing board by a fellow architecture student about sharing a meal at a local eatery with he and his friends.  I asked who exactly would be going, and all of the guys he listed I knew of simply by seeing them and their work within Design Studio (the primary architecture school class).

So, I had a choice to make.  Stay put at my desk or take a risk and join them for dinner on this fateful Sunday evening.

I'm sure glad I went with them.

In high school, I was always the boy in the background, making a point to be as invisible as possible.  I never felt all that comfortable in my own skin, but especially in high school.  Thankfully, Architecture School was somewhat different in this regard, but I had the previous years of existing socially incognito that had been ingrained in my way of living out my life.

At the restaurant (pizza), after we ordered our food, I sat down amongst 6 or 7 guys, and the one who'd personally invited me then proceeded to immediately take me through his newly developed initiation trope.  It was hilariously ridiculous and by the end, we were all laughing hysterically at this guy's good humor.  And by now, I was elated to be there, feeling welcomed and comfortable.

For years after this, our group ate pizza together on Sunday nights at this same restaurant.  We even named our clique, but I can't remember what we came up with.  These young men and all of the friendships that grew out of that group enabled me to move out of survival mode as a college student.

This was my first real taste of relational accountability, and it was heavenly.