Bryce and his board

I finally found some footage of Bryce with his board, so I through a bunch of short clips together. Enjoy!

Videos of Bryce

I've started uploading Bryce videos to youtube. You can see the ones I've got so far by clicking here.
Here's a sample of what you'll find...

Bryce telling anyone and everyone that they are, in fact, "codfish." (He liked Peter Pan).

Bryce on his mission with a meercat on his shoulder.

Note: If you have any video clips with Bryce please email them to me and I'll get them posted (tylerchristensen@tyandnat.com). Thanks.

For Those I Love and Those Who Love Me

When I am gone, release me -- let me go.
I have so many things to see and do.
You must not tie yourself to me with tears.

I gave my love, you can only guess
How much you gave to me in happiness.
I thank you for the love that you have shown,
But now it's time: I travel on alone.

So grieve awhile for me, if grieve you must,
Then let your grief be comforted by trust.
It's only for awhile that we must part,
So bless now, the memories within your heart.

I won't be far away, for life goes on:
So if you need me -- call, and I will come.
Though you can't see me, or touch me, I'll be near
And if you listen with your heart, you'll hear
All my love around you, soft and clear.
And then when you come this way alone,
I'll greet you with a smile and "Welcome Home".

Mom's cooking

I was remembering yesterday how just a couple of weeks ago Bryce had told Willy to make sure he let him know the next time I made my Mexican Enchiladas. Well I served a spanish mission and learned how to make what I think, are the very BEST Chicken Enchiladas. I guess Bryce heard from Willy how good they are and he wanted to try them. Well, just a couple weeks ago i made these delicious enchiladas and Willy told Bryce to come over right after church and eat some. Both Bryce and Brad showed up to eat the pan I had saved for them. They both scarfed them down so fast and Bryce told me 2 or 3 times he thought they were really good. Then I asked... "Bryce, aren't they the BEST enchiladas in the whole world!?" he shocked me when he replied, "yeah, they're way good.... almost as good as my mom's." WHAT! "almost?" i answered. Bryce looked at me and smiled, I could tell he was being careful with his words. "they're really good" he said, "but.... my mom makes really good ones too." I sat there for quite some time and tried to force Bryce to tell me they were better than his mom's cooking. Then I tried to get him to say they were equally as good. It was useless. Bryce confirmed that he loved my enchiladas, but they still didn't top his Mom's delicious cooking. I think I'm going to have to try your enchiladas Wynette.

~ Mary Wollenzien

I'm going to miss that funny kid.

From my Ward Primary...out of the mouth of babes

Dear Sister and Brother Christensen: I'm so sorry about Bryce. He was a really good man and he dressed nice. --Zach Staheli
Some days are bright. Some days are gloomy. But when Bryce is around it's all ways bright! Love Alyvia Dietz
Dear Sister Christensen: I'm sorry for what happened to Bryce. But I'm glad he's up with Jesus. Love Wiliam Dietz. P.S. I'm sure that Brad will miss his friend.
I'm sorry about your son! but I know he is doing just fine! Jacee Holt
Hope you can get happy again soon. Sincerely, Carrie YOung
Dear Sister Christensen: I am so sorry about what happened. If we can do anything please call us we would love to help. I leave you with my best wishes. Love: Alexis Johnson
From Kelli Crotts: I feel bad for you.
Dear Mrs. Christensen: I'm so sorry about Bryce and I hope you feel better and I remember that Bryce was a great snowboarder and skate boarder and that he was really, really, cool. He always was really nice to me and that everybody loved him and so did I! Sincerely, Gunner Gordon P.s. You're awesome and I love you.
I'm sorry that your son died. I will think and pray for your family. Sincerely, Torrie Grant
Srooy that happened from Aubrey Hatfield ( big heart drawn with Mourn with the ones who mourn and comfort the ones that need to be comforted.)
I hope you can feel better. Ashlee.
Remember that he is very happy up in heaven with people he knows and loves.
Be Happy. We know where he is. We all love you and him. He is being a missionary there too. By Sydney Tanner
Dear Sister Christensen: I'm glad you are my teacher. I'm sorry and I hope you feel better. Mikaya Broomhead.

Elder Christensen by Sophie Ridley

Note from Spain--Elder Tanner/ friend from childhood and ward

Good Morning, Well, that email took some time to sink in, those are two very sad events. I appreciate you telling me and hope you will send my condolences to both families. I appreciate the friendship I have had with Bryce, he sent me a letter or two while I have been on the mission. I really appreciated it because we weren´t real close when we left on our missions but there was still that friendship between us. He was an incredible person. I want you to know that things are going very well here. We are all healthy and happy. I hope you don´t mind but I am going to keep the email short, simply because news like that is hard to respond to. I do want you all to know I am well and not to worry about a thing. I am going to take some time to think, I will also put a few thoughts on paper so the Christensen family can put together that book you were talking about. I am very happy to hear about all the missionary efforts going on in our ward! That's great that Matt Stewart will be serving. We have an incredible ward full of great leaders and a lot of unity. I find it appropriate to share my testimony of the plan of Salvation. I know with a certainty that we are children of a eternal family, that our Father in Heaven loves us. He shows that love by the very smallest of blessings in every day of our lives. He has given us everything necessary to be happy in this life and to have an incredible hope of something even better in the life to come. We must simply take advantage of this knowledge He has given us through the restored Gospel.
I love you all very much and hope you have a good week, being grateful for
all the blessings we have in the many forms that they come!!
Love Jordan

Message from Spain ...Elder Beatty and long time friend

Dear Family,
Well... I really don't know what to say. I don't think that I can feel that Bryce has passed away. It has been so long since I have seen him that it is unreal. We had a lot of good times together. I will never forget them. He was always a good friend and I will never forget the times we had doing stupid things or riding some type of board.
Tell Wynette that I will come and visit her, just as I did before the mission. Bryce will always have a special place in my heart.

Life is something that is fragile. We have to live it to the fullest everyday. God really has created a sacred plan for us, and he has thought of every single last detail. I know that families can be eternal. That is why we have made the covenants that we have, we can live with each other forever. I'm thankful for mom and dad and for the covenants that they have made so that if anything happens to us we can be together in the eternities. I'm also thankful for my friend's parents, especially Bryce's; they will be together after this life. I know it... without any doubts or reservations. Much can be learned from each experience that we have, we only need to look for it. Along with Bryce's family, I will also be learning from his passing for a very long time.
I'm at a loss of words this week. Know that I love you all very, very much. I hope the best for all of you. Be safe, have fun, you never know when it will be your last.
Love, matthew
p.s. I'm thinking that there might have to be a mandatory snowboarding trip made on the 7th of January every year, I'll pay.

Tribute from Pete Carroll--fellow missionary , dear friend, sounds like Bryce if you listen closely

For Bryce:

1. Bryce was good. He was inherently good. He was trusting. He unassumingly expected nothing but goodness from you too. And with me he got it. He brought out goodness in me.
2. Bryce was clean. He had a spiritual purity that I respect. He was also physically clean. I am sure that he exerted a great deal of patience with me when we used to live together. He went out of his way to be clean. This is a facet of God’s character that he understood. He knew that the spirit resides in orderly places. He took better care of his teeth than anyone I have ever known!
3. Bryce was an excellent teacher. He knew the gospel was true and he understood it clearly. He made sure that others knew the same. There was an engaging nature to his teaching. He did not fear saying the clear-cut things that are sometimes skirted around because they are difficult. He taught those things in a great demonstration of being bold without overbearance.
4. Bryce loved purple Gatorade.
5. Bryce loved his family. He loved his roots. He spoke particularly highly of his parents. I never knew another missionary to express respect for great parental influence with such frequency. He recognized the blessing of righteous parents. He was proud of his whole family – and rightly so.
6. Bryce was accommodating. The Lord, who, among other things, allowed him to train many new missionaries, recognized this. He was put in many uncomfortable situations. He bore it. His reaction was never “I give up”. For this he was greatly blessed.
7. Bryce was fun. We cooked together. We snowboarded together. We loved doing missionary work together. We mutually laughed.
8. Bryce was faithful. He was not afraid to follow the council of prophets. I know that he believed in the Plan of Salvation. I know that he knew that the plan is true because of the way he taught it and the way he lived it.
9. Bryce was diligent. He recognized the urgency of the work of the Lord and acted accordingly. I know that he, even now, recognizes that urgency. And I would suspect that, even now, he is acting accordingly.



I love you, Bryce. I am a better person because I knew you. I will miss not having you here in mortality, but I pray that one day I will see you again. Until then, keep well.

Love,

A Friend

Thoughts from his misisonary brother Elderdallinchristensen.blogspot.com

It's been a tough week, but I've been very blessed. It was great to see you on Wednesday, but very bittersweet. It sounds like you've had a lot of people to talk to and a lot of support. I'm glad that you were able to talk to all of Bryce's friends. Hopefully he inspired a few of them to be better.
It's sort of funny, you mentioned reading through Bryce's journal, and Kira mentioned specifically that Bryce had so much potential that she never quite saw. I guess I got a different perspective from all of the other kids because I lived with Bryce when he was in high school. I definitely saw that potential that Kira talked about. But he definitely down played everything and tried to lay low. But it was amazing after his mission to see that he was starting to really live life to the fullest.
It's amazing how much comfort and peace I have had this week. Especially on Wednesday and Thursday, as soon as the day was over and my missionary duties were done, my thoughts and feelings came over me like a flood. I feel like the Lord allowed everything to be suppressed so that I could do my work, but once the work was done, I got everything rushed at me. So nights are definitely hard because I have time to think. During the day, I am usually so busy that I don't have time to ponder or think too much about anything but missionary work.

Message from companion: Elder Richard Bean

Dear Family and Friends,
It was tough hearing about my dear companion Bryce Christensen. After faithfully serving a mission and being my companion from July 21st 2008 to September 2nd 2008, he was killed in a car accident near Provo, Utah. I have been thinking what I could say that could express my thoughts and feelings; scriptures came to mind –
D&C 7:2, "…Lord, give unto me power over death, that I may live and bring souls unto thee." He was a very diligent companion – who loved and cared for the people he served.
D&C 202:36, "Wherefore, fear not even unto death; for in this world your joy is not full, but in me your joy is full."
D&C 138:57. He is continuing to do what he does so well.

My thoughts and prayers go out to his family – one of great faith. I know he and his funny personality are doing great work in the next life. To tell you a bit of who he was:
-It was his idea to name every piece of furniture in the boarding.
-We also named our swimming pool outside "garth" (we never used it, don't worry) – "Give it to Garth!!!"
-We had a contest to see how many pieces of gum we could chew in our mouth.
-We celebrated his 21st birthday party in the house of Bro. Mbulelo. We played drums, ate cake, and sang songs. 30 people came over and celebrated it with us – all because the sound of the drum.
-He loved small cookies called "buiscuts". We bought many of them (about 2 cents each)
-We taught Sister Nozuko who was baptized about 6 weeks after he left the area. He was a major role in her becoming converted.
-He influenced so many other people he met including me. What a wonderful brother.

Bryce and Fashion

Hi! I'm Kelsey Hall,I was in Bryce's ward in Spanish Fork. Dallin is a really good friend of mine and your dad is my Stake President.

I didn't know Bryce extremely well, mostly because of our age difference. I was a little sophomore in high school when he was a senior. I do remember watching him on the Spanish Fork channel and wondering why on earth his hair was so long ;) He was very good at his video productions and I know that he had a great love for it.

What I will always remember about Bryce though is his interesting taste in clothing. I would always see him around school wearing his cargo shorts, and a t shirt with a sports jacket over the t shirt and carrying a briefcase of some sort. Almost like he was sporting a business man look to go along with his skater look :) I was never really sure why he would do that, I guess it was just Bryce's way of expressing himself.

I also know that Bryce was a great example to his brother Dallin. Dallin looked up to Bryce in a lot of ways and I know he missed him while he was in South Africa. He was also a good example for our ward, we all loved him very much

If I die before I wake, at least in heaven I can skate

I was able to see quite a change in Bryce from before and after his mission. However, it should be noted that even before his mission, though he may have wanted to do crazy stuff and disobey his parents, he never did. Sure he had crazy hair and was a “skater,” but the great potential he had was always very visible to those around him. Let me give you an idea of one of the noticeable changes I did see.

On Friday, I was able to read a few entries from his journal before his mission. I can’t remember the exact wording but it went something like this. “Nothing happened today. No, nothing at all. I am writing in my journal because my mom is making me. If I am reading this, it is because I have no life. So Bryce, if you’re reading this, get up and go do something to make me proud.” This is how the majority of the entries were—doing things because mom was “making me.”

Upon returning from South Africa, I was talking to Bryce in his basement room for a good while about school, dating, snowboarding, girls, living arrangements, skateboarding and dating and girls. I tried to convince Bryce that he should talk to his dad about applying to BYU and live in a student ward to meet new people. He made it very clear that he was going to stay at home that semester, not because it didn’t sound fun or because he didn’t have the money, but because he wanted so badly to be there for his parents. He explained that it would be too hard on them for both he and his little brother (Dallin would be leaving in a few days for the Sapporo, Japan mission) to leave at the same time.

Bryce honored, respected, and looked up to his parents so much. He wanted nothing more than to make them happy and make them proud, and he sure did.

Before visiting with Bryce’s family, I tried to find anything I had that would provide for them another memory of Bryce. I was only able to scrounge up a few minutes of skateboarding footage we had taken a few years earlier. Bryce wanted to make a skate video together at that time and wanted to call it B.R.B. You see, Bryce thought he was so clever because it was a play on words. It would stand for Bryce, Richard, Brian, and also for Be Right Back (meaning we will be right back with another video). I now think of Be Right Back as a reminder that Bryce will only be gone for a short time.

Bryce never did take my advice about moving out (thankfully) but I found through my visit with his family that he did take the advice about talking to his dad and applying to BYU. He was accepted to winter semester on Tuesday morning (the day after winter classes had started).

I hope heaven is a halfpipe. I love you man. You will be missed.

--Brian

Bryce's life from Sister-in-law Natalie

I didn't get to know Bryce the way I had been hoping and expecting to know him. I just read an entry in his journal from 2003 three that said, "Tyler is getting a wife in September." I was laughing so hard because that was our relationship at the beginning, "the wife of Tyler." He didn't know what to make of this new person. But I remember him at that time being very reserved, then he would suddenly spout out something incredibly funny. I loved him being there.
Tyler and I left Utah for the next two years while he was in High School. I would only see him in passing during our visits. Though I barely knew him I was intrigued at how he lived life. He passed an air of just 'hanging out', yet he worked very hard in areas that interested him: music, snowboarding and video. I anxiously waited to see what profession he chose. I doubted that he would pursue an academically oriented career, but I was sure he was a creative genius that would surprise us all.
We were all excited that he chose to serve a mission and the South Africa mission seemed to be perfect. I guess that had been the first time he had ever gotten on an air plane, but something as adventurous as Africa was fitting. It was exciting to watch him grow on his mission and hear his testimony develop even stronger. I imagined his character taking a major shift as he saw the living conditions of those he taught. Though I hadn't gone on a foreign mission, I had still experienced that and thought Bryce was likely having a similar experience. I saw his feelings for his family grow stronger, I'm guessing as he tried to teach adults to pray, read the scriptures and live the gospel he realized he had learned these skills from very dedicated parents. It makes you humbly aware of how much you have been blessed in life.
Needless to say, Bryce came back a different person. He was still cool, laid back and incredibly funny, but he was different. I had already imagined how well I would get to know Bryce. I talked with my son Eli about Bryce and where he had been serving. I could tell, though it was awkward, Bryce really wanted to know his niece and nephew. And I really wanted him to. Bryce was even trying to get to know me and there is no question in my mind that one day we will know each other quite well.
I am really going to miss you Bryce, I look forward to seeing you and learning about the creative genius you've become. :)

Take care,

love Natalie

Tribute to Bryce by big bro Tyler

I thought that creating a blog for Bryce would be a good way for many of his friends and family to express what he meant to them and maybe share a few stories, pictures, videos, etc. You might wish to write how you knew Bryce, what you liked about him, and share stories of experiences you had with him. If many of his friends post here I'll compile the stories and remembrances and make a book out of it for his parents, so please write from your heart.

What I remember about Bryce.
Bryce has always done his own thing. Once, when he was barely old enough to walk, he went missing for several hours. Mom freaked out and we called the police and all of our friends and everyone started searching the streets. He was found about a mile from our house just kicking it, looking at some horses. I guess we should have paid closer attention when he expressed his desire to see the horses. That was one of many times that Bryce turned up missing because he wanted to see or do something.

Another thing that touched me about Bryce recently was how he interacted with his niece and nephew. Bryce didn't really know how to act around kids and it was pretty obvious. But that didn't stop him from trying. While we were visiting in November he tried wrestling with Eli and awkwardly held Sharon for as long as she could tolerate it. As we've skyped a few times since then Bryce will get behind the webcam and simply hang out. He didn't really know what to say but he wanted his niece and nephew to see who he was and that he cared. I guess Bryce is like that--he's not too flashy but he really cares.

I'm going to miss you Bryce. Love your big bro,
Tyler