July 3, 2012 w/ pictures

This email will be short and sweet: I am serving in San Clemente and I 100% love my greenie. She is fabulous and hilarious. Seriously, we have no investigators, no idea about our area, no solid focus 15, nada, and we have had a blast. Oh man, it's been fun. Tuesday I was shaking like a leaf waiting to find out what the deal was. When my greenie was called, Becky Andrus, she curtsied and I was thinking, "Oh heck, who is this chick?" I pretty much smiled and nodded all night. Transfers are exhausting.

Wednesday was the most stressful day of my life and on Thursday I made the conscious decision to chill out and have fun. From that point on it's been awesome. Sister Andrus' life motto is "get crazy"--do you remember mine, "party hard"?...yeah, we plan to have a lot of fun haha. We have tons of faith that we are going to blow this place out of the water. We already picked up an investigator on Sunday, Carmen (we call her Carmen San Diego from the computer game we played as children, "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego"). She has a son on a Mormon mission in Honduras, but she knows nothing about the Church. We are stoked, to say the least. We will see her later this week. Pray for her!

We did some service (I built a trellis) on Friday and Saturday. On Sunday we both bore our testimonies to the ward. We are getting them pumped on missionary work. Everyone keeps telling us how excited they are to have sister missionaries because they haven't had them in well over five years. On Monday we had back-to-back appointments with people in the ward to help us get more familiar with everyone and get involved.

Our ward mission leader is amazing. They bought us each a GPS to help us get around the area. They help us out in every way possible and it's been so helpful! We are right on the beach so in the morning we sometimes bike to an overlook and watch the waves roll in. Also we cover part of Camp Pendalton so we work a TON with military families and Marines. I am slowly learning the lingo. We mostly contact (talk to random people on the street) to shirtless surfer boys....a little awkward but we laugh so much that nothing phases us. I am stoked on life. Awesome companions make the hardest of situations seem fabulous.

Party hard and enjoy the 4th! I love America!! Holla!

Party hard,
Sister Christensen

P.S. Just so everyone who writes me is aware, now that I am not right next to the mission office, the mail system is even slower. Every letter I get is now about two weeks later than when it was written. It blows but whatev, I am in San Clemente! It's beautiful, I can't complain.

My trainer (going home!) and my greenie!

Cheesecake night!