Helping to Gather Israel as a Service Missionary
With the help of my family, we decided to start a Billion Graves assignment, taking pictures at the Anfield cemetery in Liverpool. Everything was okay because the headstones were clear, and it was easy to take legible pictures- although we had to deal with English weather, trying to avoid the pouring rain, something difficult to achieve. The cemetery was about 20 minutes from our home.
We then realised that the task was too big, as it was not close enough, so we searched for something smaller and closer to our home. That is when we started at St Chad’s cemetery which was just five minutes from home. Whenever it was not raining, we just ran to take pictures.
There was a lot to do, not because of the number of headstones, but because of the challenges we had when we got there. We needed gloves to remove the grass and dust the leaves off the headstones, to get clear pictures. We found loads of weeds to remove, even stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) and we got many stings on our arms. There were so many weeds and we even found trees growing from some of these headstones.
Many headstones were buried in the ground so that the names and dates were underground. That was when we started bringing small shovels to remove the soil and dig up the headstones to read the information we could not see. We took spatulas, brushes and knee pads, to help in this work. Our tool bag kept growing bigger each time.
At the end of a row of headstones, we found a whole family: all five of their children had died in the same year. When we got home, we did some research and found out there was a cholera epidemic in that same year in England. We could feel the grief of that mother who buried all her children.
One day we found 2 headstones full of names, but they were buried in the ground, so we started digging and it took some time to uncover both headstones. But as I was observing what we had just done, I realised that there was a gap between those gravestones. I checked with my shoe, and there it was another huge headstone that we needed to unbury as well.
There were lots of challenges to overcome, but as a family, we were also blessed to know that this assignment needed to be done, and we felt appreciation from the ones on the other side of the veil that their information could be available online. This was a reminder of the words of King Benjamin (Mosiah 2:17): “when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God.”
When I had served for about twenty months, we reached 10,000 pictures taken and I received a special shirt for that achievement from Elder and Sister Hoar, my Service Mission Leaders.
In my last month, my mum went with me during the Easter break. It was a sunny day, but there were some grey clouds threatening on the horizon. We started taking the pictures and we really wanted to take advantage of my mother’s time off from work, but the grey clouds started getting closer and darker. We prayed asking Heavenly Father for help to achieve our goal. And then, in a blink of an eye, there was some wind and the clouds moved, and it was sunny again. And it happened again, so we prayed once more, and we had sun a second time. We did this three times, and we had positive results from our prayers each time. We completed our goal: we finished that section, and we ended up taking 405 pictures on that day.
When we were going back to the car, instead of going through the path on the side, we decided to cross over the section which we had done before. It was then when my mum felt like someone was calling to be found and we were prompted to look down.
There it was, a small headstone, probably no more than 15 by 20 cm, with two names on it that we had not recorded. If my mother had not followed that prompting, we would have missed that couple.
That experience reminded me that sometimes the veil between this life and the life beyond becomes very thin. There are so many people in the spirit world that didn’t get the chance to have the gospel in their lives, and we are the ones who can help them. It has been an incredible opportunity for all our family to serve others on the other side of the veil and, as President Nelson said, “[Now is] the most crucial time in the history of the world, to help gather Israel” because “the worth of souls is great in the sight of God” (Doctrine and Covenants 18:10).
I am grateful for the opportunity I have had to serve as a service missionary, to help people on both sides of the veil and for the love of my family who helped me to serve.
Elder Flores uploaded 16,431 pictures to Billion Graves by the end of his mission.