Culture

It's funny when I think about this weekend and different American cultures I have been a part of.

Last night my CED group was in a room during our 3 month IST and we were at the relax party time of the training. We sat around and played To Tell The Truth and stayed up really late talking. When we left I looked around and there were wrappers from the snacks we'd had all day and paper from the materials we had used during training and the room was just a little bit untidy. I looked around and thought before we left, "Oh, we should pick this trash up."

When I realized we didn't really do that. As a whole as a group I got to thinking about my past culture where I spent a lot of time with my Campus Crusade and Crossings and Wired River of Life College group friends. So often when we left a room (The youth room, a room at the Omni during the Passion Conference, or the Worship center at Cedarmore as examples.) someone would say, "Maybe we should pick up this room." We pushed in chairs and picked up trash and generally clean swept multiple rooms before we left them.

Now, I'm not necessarily trying to say that my CED friends should have cleaned this room. A. We are coming back today for more training. And B. It's a hotel meeting room that has a cleaning crew to clean the basic messes after a group uses a room for training. (I'm saying, if someone in my CED group had for example spilled the entire bucket of tea on the floor we would have laughed at them and then took the steps to have that cleaned up, not said "Oh, there's a cleaning crew, they'll get to this when we leave.)

People in my CED group do clean up their messes, I'm simply talking about the general clutter that comes from having 20 or so people gather in one space to do trainings.

So, what does all of this mean? Nothing really, except that I am realizing again how different culture can be even within the confines of one shared similar culture.

When my "church friends" we have a culture I didn't realize of as a group tidying up a room (even when a cleaning person is coming in after we leave) that I didn't realize wasn't something every American is programmed to think about and specifically didn't realize I was programmed to think about until I found myself thinking about it constantly.