October 20, 2020

 Zooming is the new way of meeting with people for church or for other reasons. We never heard of it before covid restriction were put in place. We zoomed Carol Jones again this week and gave her the last of the ‘new member’ lessons and agreed we would continue to meet with her weekly and discuss other gospel topics. We zoomed sacrament meeting on Sunday and I zoomed a meeting with the Relief Society Presidency to discuss the format for the upcoming lesson this week. Tom and Athol Symonds have been zooming trying to figure out how to incorporate Tabernacle Choir music into the ward zoom only Sacrament meetings. We also zoomed into a ‘viewing’ for Josie McCarthy’s husband who passed away recently. They will also zoom the funeral this coming Saturday. We do a great deal of zooming.

We have been asked to organize the ward Christmas Musical and so we have been working on that this week and calling people to perform. I think we have a simple but beautiful program in place and we have some great people taking part. We have Julie Duerichen and her daughter Holly singing, Rueben Leonard singing as well as Charlotte Law singing and the Tsai brothers singing and /or playing instruments.  Carol Hur is playing the violin and Brian and Brenda Leavitt are our readers. We are calling  it “Silent - Holy Night” and plan on it being about 45 minutes long. We will zoom at least one of the two performances and perhaps record and broadcast a version of it. We still need someone to do decor, handle filming/sound and someone to play accompaniment. It is falling into place,

We also cleaned up the back deck for winter, cut Tom’s hair and took Carol Jones the sacrament on Sunday. We have both made phone appointments with our own doctors this week which is also the new way of doing things. We received an email from our London Temple President this week which included his desires for us to return in the near future. He feels it will be 6-9 months before we are able to go back. We answer emails, phone our family and others and tend to our house and yard. We FaceTime our family and connect with our ministering people by email or phone. Roger Jahn has another aneurism and will have surgery in December. Our world seems small at times but it does go beyond our walls and we are grateful for that. Our family are all busy and we appreciate them and each other.