Elder Sam Christensen

We received the following email from Sam on Sunday, Oct. 5, 2014. Our questions/statements are in italics. In his second paragraph, Sam talks about meeting a guy named Brian Melcher. He was a missionary to Cambodia several years ago. Peter and I met Brian about 6 months ago and asked him lots of questions about his mission. He told us he and his family were going to be taking a trip to Cambodia in the fall and that they would try to look Sam up and see how he was doing. So that visit is what Sam describes in paragraph two. The photos at the end are some Brian emailed to us.

General Conference was great. Some of the speakers spoke in their native tongues--Cantonese, Portuguese, Spanish. I recall saying something about thinking speakers should speak in their native language. Uchtdorf is still speaking in English, right?

Yeah I saw Brian and his family. He certainly does love his mission. We were at a baptism for 3 people in our ward who just turned 8 and their dads baptized them. When I first saw him it was pretty funny because I saw these 3 white people [Brian, his wife, & his son] walking up to the church and I was the first one to talk to them and then about 3 minutes later he asked an elder standing right next to me if he knew an Elder Christensen with red hair. The elder's like "ummmmm yeaahhhh." I thought for sure Melcher was looking for someone else, but then he said no it's me and then I knew who he was. I guess Melcher served with the stake president who I've previously said is a total boss. After the baptism they had some little refreshments, but elder Yorgason and I had already started our fast so we told them we couldn't eat anything. But Melcher heard that and he's like "oh man, that's awesome. I'm so jealous of you guys right now." I'm like whyyy...cause we're fasting?

So we got transfer calls last night, but Elder Yorgason got the call to be the next AP on Saturday night. Right now I'm in a tripan and he's getting trained because APs go in a week early. I'm obviously staying in Teuk Thla, but before I was just in TT North. Now there's just one TT because they're taking both the south elders out and putting one pair of sisters back into TT. My new companion is Khmae, I don't really know him yet. We'll switch on Friday. And the two new sisters are both Khmae. I'll be the only one that knows the area at all. I have to learn sort of the south area in these few days I'm with the south elders. It's going to be really really hard. Like the guy who's in TT South right now was saying last night how stressed out he was because he has so many referrals and people he thinks he has to meet and he has no idea how to keep up with it all. Now I have that problem plus all the people in my area. It sounds like the work is just blowing up here, but usually these people wash out after a lesson or two. There were just a lot of contacts because we had a massive English class turn out last week. It will be nice to have sisters back in TT though to help because there are so many rules about meeting with girls that it makes it super hard to do it and since they had taken sisters out last transfer we had to tread water. So yeah, I have to try to find out everything that goes on in their area. My area is easy, I could do north no problem. Their area is hard and their organization of stuff is more than suspect. uhhhhh. I haven't said much about Elder Yorgason, but I'll just say now that he was the best guy I could have ever imagined to be my trainer. He was just a great, great guy. In a lot of ways he reminds me of Peter. He'll be a killer AP. Yeah so this transfer is massive.

When I get back we'll all have to take a family trip to California and we can go hang out in Long Beach for like a day or two and I can speak Khmae, and then we can head up to Mexico town and Emily can speak Spanish. Then we can go to Hermosa and Orange County. That would be super cool.

My final thought is this: If so many people that don't even know us think we're prophets, why do we get cut off on the road so often?