My community just came back from a four-day Silent Retreat at a Jesuit retreat center in Morristown, NJ. We spent 40 hours of that time in silence, following guidelines laid out by St. Ignatious in his Spiritual Exercises.

Although I had been looking forward to this retreat for months (nothing is so precious to an introvert as some silent time!), when we arrived, I was not in the greatest of moods. Work at the shelter had seemed unusually stressful for the previous few weeks, and the last thing I wanted to do was get trapped inside my head with my thoughts.

Looking back, however, I'm pretty sure that this mood was all part of God's providential plan for me during this retreat. On the advice of the awesome spiritual director I was paired with, I tried to put down my expectations for the weekend and just relax and let God come to me. Which, of course, He did. I spent hours in the retreat center's tiny chapel, just sitting with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and being reminded yet again of how deeply and intimately God loves us.

Coming into the retreat as I did forced me to confront the darkness that is so often part of the spiritual life, those times when God seems far away from our struggles on earth. It forced me to lay down all of the pain and brokenness I had been carrying around with me from the shelter, to come before God and say, Lord, this is where I am, and I can't find You here.

And the miracle is, God found me. I struggle so often to see God amidst the chaos of the shelter, where change is slow and hope often seems far away. Yet what this experience taught me is that if I simply ask God to reveal Himself, He will. Jesus reminds us that whatever we ask of God in prayer, He will give us - even if it is simply the gift of His Presence, which is sometimes what we need most.