Happenings from Altoona!

Greetings!

Hope this finds you warm, unburied, and great! This past weekend we've had a good snowstorm come through, giving us at least 13 inches here! Other locations in Altoona had measurements up towards 20 inches.

Of course it's still winter time, and so the cold, and the snow has been around, keeping things interesting for us.

Over the past couple weeks nothing too out of the ordinary has gone one. We've had our usual CSF meeting on Tuesday and talked about Christian maturity and what that looks like. The reason for this discussion was because of what the semester will (hopefully) be bringing. We're continuing with our theme of Religion as a verb, how to proper do a Christ centered religion. Last semester we looked at the life of Jesus through the book of Luke, and this semester we're taking what we learned through viewing his interactions with people, and applying those to real world situations. In order to do this we will need maturity. We plan on discussing other religions, terrorism, sexuality, capitalism, mental illness, divorce, substance abuse. We don't know who is dealing with what, and so because of that we have to be mindful and mature in our discussions. This week we're approaching the topic of "Why do bad things happen to good people." I'm looking forward to talking about this because of just how often we deal with this question.

Tomorrow we're getting a men's Bible study under way which I'm dubbing "Bearded Bosses of the Bible." This week we're going to be looking at Noah, his life, what went on around him, what he did that we should emulate, and what we should take note of and avoid.

This semester during our Wednesday night Bible study at Church we're beginning to go through Galatians. We'll go through that at whatever pace we go at, be it a chapter, a passage, or a verse a week, and keep going through the following Epistles.

Today I got to meet with the Campus Activities Board (CAB) to discuss how CSF can partner with them to help sponsor or host different events throughout the semester. I came with a few idea's that they seemed to like, and I'm looking forward to what we can do together for the campus.

Other than that not much has been going on here. This semester I'm taking a class on C.S. Lewis's theological works which has been great so far. Two weeks ago I got to read the Screwtape Letters, my first time reading through them, and it really showed some insight into my own life and temptations that I face. Last week and this week I have to read Mere Christianity which is awesome, but also very time consuming. This is my second read of it, and I feel that I've grown intellectually and theologically since the last time that I've read it, so that this reading is done in a whole new light, one where I begin to wrestle a lot more with what Lewis wrote. Since this is Lewis telling what Christianity is (for lack of a better term), I think it'll add a lot more to the teaching aspects of what we're talking about this semester. Reasons why things the way they are in the world, how we should approach different topics, answering questions like "Why would God allow this to happen?"

But that's what we got here. Thank you for all your support, and please keep the ministry in prayer for us! We appreciate all you do!