Amazing Young Women

I know some adorable, amazing young women!  These four girls are the only girls we have downtown in our church branch right now.  They're so cute in how they interact and help each other.  On this particular night, Lizzie and Avalon came over to help record a portion of a song all of the young women were going to sing for Zoom District Conference at church.  Avalon just moved here a few months ago, and she has integrated with the other sweet, loving girls beautifully. 

With the serious though, comes the fun, and these girls are always up for fun!  The picture doesn't show it, but Avalon is standing on a stool that lifted her about 8 or 9 inches.  The girls didn't want her to feel  bad about her being so short compared to them, so they raised her up.  She was still shorter than them, but it definitely helped!  

We've been doing zoom church since December 27th because of a small number of cases of Covid in Shunyi.  The leadership decided to head off some potential issues with the branch members and the church's reputation, by canceling in person meetings since more than half our branch lives in Shunyi.  There were also a few new cases downtown, as well as in Shanghai and Tianjin a few hours away, so things with the government were getting strict again and nerves were high.  If someone in the branch in Shunyi had indeed been exposed to Covid, that would have put everyone in the branch in all of the different housing and apartment complexes at risk of having to do mandatory quarantine, which is now 21 days here in China (lockdown quarantine, taking your temperatures multiple times a day, multiple Covid tests, etc).  And of course we would have been at risk of not meeting in person for church for a long time.  Foreigners are seen as a threat here because our countries have been out of control with the virus.  So even though we live here and have lived under the governments rules and policies with the virus, we are seen as a threat.   It would look really bad if our church full of foreign passport holders had a breakout with Covid.  We're grateful the leadership was proactive in avoiding that, and we're looking forward to being back in the church building together soon!  

For now, we have to get creative with how we do things.  Like this song for example--the girls in Shunyi got together and recorded their portions, and the downtown girls sang the harmony part for the song because we didn't have church on Sundays to put it together, and we live far enough apart that a mid-week activity is too hard to get everyone together.  The girls had never sung the song before, so we listened to a recorded version of the harmony that Sister Tanner made and then practiced it a few times through before recording.  They were quick learners luckily!  Amy T. put all of the recordings together to make a complete song with parts.  She did an amazing job putting it together and the girls did a great job singing!