Once a sociologist, always a sociologist

I'm a sociologist at heart. I always have been and I always will be. I love learning about different cultures and different people and seeing patterns in the way that different people groups behave. I love understanding relationships and how they work and why they work and why they don't. It fascinates me. It's intangible and big picture, yet at the same time it's tangible and small picture. I love it.

My newest sociology undertaking has been discovering just how different California culture is from Southern culture. The main reason for my new found fascination is because some of my very dear friends from New Staff Training are from the South (North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia to be exact). Between getting to know them, learning more about their upbringing and hearing their stories from their ministry partner development time, I've begun to realize just how radically different California is. From the food, to the things people value, to the influence of the church... it's all different. I recently spent some time down there visiting my friends and attending a conference, and I gotta say, there were times where I felt like I had left the country. And I loved every minute of it.

Here are some of the major differences that I've observed so far:
- the Southern definition of traffic and the California definition of traffic are two very different things
- Fried food is everywhere in the South. It's hard to get away from it.
- One of the most valuable things to Californians is time.
- Southern hospitality still lives up to its name, as does the Bible Belt.
- Californians aren't afraid to be rude. I might even go so far as to call it our norm.
- The influence of families is different. (I'm still thinking through this one. I'm aware that it's different, but I'm still discovering exactly how)

By no means is this list exhaustive and please hear me when I say I'm not claiming to be an expert. I just love noticing the differences between cultures, and try as I might, I can't turn off my fascination with discovering these things. And to think I went into college as a biology major :)

Soup to nuts?

We were sitting in our Intro to Christian Theology class at New Staff Training. I have to admit I wasn't paying super close attention to the lecture. It was a nice day and I was staring out the window at the beach, wondering how much more time in between now and when I could be out on the beach playing volleyball. Then our professor said it, "It's the soup to nuts..." I don't remember what he was talking about or what it was a reference to, but I clearly remember the phrase. I looked around at my friends and saw their faces were just as confused as mine; clearly none of us knew what that phrase meant. My friend busted out her iPhone and looked it up, and here's what we found out, thanks to Wikipedia:
"'Soup to nuts' is an American English idiom conveying the meaning of "from beginning to end". It is derived from the description of a full course dinner, in which courses progress from soup to a dessert of nuts. It is comparable to expressions in other languages, such as the Latin phrase ab ovo usque ad mala ("from the egg to the apples"), describing the typical Roman meal."
The phrase kind of stuck with us, and we used it as often as possible for the rest of our time at training. It wasn't often, because the proper use of this phrase doesn't come up in daily conversation too often, but that just made it all the better when someone actually got to use it.

So here it is: the soup to nuts, the beginning to end, the life and times of a full-time Campus Crusade staff member. Some things will be serious and thought-provoking, some things will be random and silly. Some will be about me, some will be about my friends, some will be about ministry, some will just be about life in general. So... here we go!