"Hi, St. Joseph!"

This past Saturday, I had the opportunity to explore part of the San Bernardino National Forest in the San Jacinto Mountains with my fiancé, David. He knew about some abandoned gold mines from the late 1800s tucked away in the mountains, and we just couldn’t pass up the opportunity for an adventure after being cooped up inside for so long.

While David had been there with his dad and brother several years ago, I really had no idea what to expect. He had purposely kept the details secret, so all I knew was that there was an abandoned gold mine involved, it was out past Idyllwild, and it was supposedly a 2-hour hike each way to and from the mine.

I was pleasantly surprised, then, when I actually had a spiritual experience up there in the mountains.

To explain, let’s backtrack to March 30. David and I had heard about this new “St. Joseph Consecration”, a 33-day process of reading and prayer that gives you a glimpse into the life of St. Joseph and ultimately strengthens your relationship with Jesus as you try to imitate St. Joseph’s virtues. We began on March 30 and finished on May 1, the feast day of St. Joseph the Worker (just one of the many names for St. Joseph, Jesus’s earthly father).

Just a few days before we finished the consecration, after we had already planned to explore the gold mine that Saturday, I got a phone call from a very excited David. In doing research on the exact coordinates of the mine and the surrounding area (it’s an unofficial site, so there are no marked trails or signs to follow), he had discovered another mine near the one we had planned to explore. This new one was called… St. Joseph’s gold mine!

Considering we had developed a special devotion do St. Joseph by then, and the day of our adventure was just one day after we were set to finish the consecration, we obviously had to add the St. Joseph mine to our itinerary.

Fast forward a few days, and it’s Saturday – adventure day. We drive for an hour and a half, past Hemet, past Idyllwild, until we reach the mountains just before Anza. We park in a neighborhood, since it’s an unofficial site in the middle of nowhere with no designated parking lot, and start our hike up into mountains.

Whatever I might have expected, I definitely hadn’t expected to be wandering through steep, rocky terrain, with dried-up riverbeds as our only “trails”, and relying on rock-climbing and playing limbo under dried tree branches when the “trail” disappeared. It was quite the challenge, but also thrilling.

About four hours and a rocky 500-foot elevation increase later, we reached our first destination. I was a little intimidated at the thought of continuing on to a second gold mine from there (especially after stubbing my toe pretty hard several times in a row), but David was so excited that it would have killed me to change the plan and just go home from there.

I should add that, in the days leading up to our adventure, David had expressed a secret hope that St. Joseph would appear to us on our way to the “St. Joseph Gold Occurrence”, as it was called. When he first told me about that wish, my first reaction was, “Yeah, that would be cool, but probably not going to happen.”

As we hiked around the mountain in search of a way up (the coordinates for the St. Joseph site showed us it was at the very top), I had it set in my mind that it was just a cool thing we were doing in honor of St. Joseph, but I wasn’t hoping for much.

At one point, we strayed from the dried riverbed we had been following so we could check out the ruins of an old structure not far off our path. After a minute, David led the way back to the riverbed. I was about 10 feet behind him, up on a hill surrounded by ankle-high brush, when I felt a very clear double-tap on my elbow. My head snapped around to see what was behind me, but there was nothing. None of the plants around me were high enough to reach my elbow, and there was nothing else in sight that could have caused me to feel that.

I called out to David, “Um, something just tapped my elbow…”

He turned around, gave a quick, “Hi, St. Joseph!”, and we continued along the path.

After quite the struggle through the brush, over rocks, and up the mountain, we finally made it to the top. Oddly enough, though, there was no trace of a gold mine, mining equipment, or anything else we had found at the other sites we had seen along our route. Nothing but rocks (more like boulders), trees, and a killer view of the sun beginning to set on the other side of the valley. We started to wonder why that particular spot had even shown up in David’s search of the area. Eventually, we gave up on trying to find anything gold-related and settled for just appreciating the view.

Once again, David mentioned his wish to see St. Joseph. As skeptical as I had been the first time he had mentioned it, he reminded me that “it never hurts to ask”. Sure enough, he was bold enough to ask for this in prayer.

“Melissa, come here! Stand right here!” he called out as I was admiring a flower bush not too far away from him. There was such an excitement in his voice that I ran to see what it was.

I stood in the spot he had indicated.

“Look up.” He pointed upward at the tallest part of the mountain, towering only slightly above where we were standing.

As I looked up, I was shocked. The silhouette of the rock above us was shaped like the profile of a man’s face.

“Hi, St. Joseph!” David’s voice from earlier echoed in my mind.

We found a spot nearby with a good view of the St. Joseph rock and the sunset in the distance. As we took a few minutes to pray the Litany of St. Joseph and some other prayers from our consecration book, I snuck another peek at the rock, and my mind wandered… I started to reflect on the difference between my attitude and David’s attitude going into the hike.

I had been so dismissive of David’s wish, seeing it as a privilege only saints really had, not bothering to even ask God for such a thing. He, on the other hand, wasn’t afraid to hope and ask God to bless us with that gift.

Of course, the rock silhouette was different than what David had probably imagined when he had first imagined seeing St. Joseph, but it was more than I had expected to see myself.

Since then, that experience has gotten me to think about all the blessings we might be missing out on because we’re too afraid to ask for them. True, solid belief in God should mean that we also believe in His ability to bless us in ways we can’t imagine for ourselves. How many times have we held back from asking God for something because we think it’s too far-fetched? Even if we don’t get exactly what we’ve asked for, God still has plenty of blessings in store for us if we just have the courage to ask.

The Bible tells us about the importance of a child-like faith. If we have the same hope that a child has when asking a parent for something they really want, I have a feeling our eyes will be opened to everyday blessings in a new and beautiful way.

What’s something “far-fetched” and bold that you want to ask God for? Discuss in the comments!