servant is listening." We have to say, "Be it done to me according to your will."

Is it hard to set aside time for retreat? Sometimes it seems impossible. Yet how many hours, even days, do we spend in the company of tiresome people, people who wear us down? How much time do we spend searching for effectiveness? For ways to manage our time? How much time do we spend worrying about things beyond our control?

Jesus deals with this overconcern. "And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest?" (Luke 12:25–26).

Finding time for retreat is as difficult as finding time for prayer in an ordinary, overscheduled day. Whether the time be days or minutes, the issues are the same. Is retreat one of our priorities? Does God have a place in our scheme? How far we have allowed ourselves to slide! How distant we feel from the spirit of prayer! Possibly the barrier is not time at all. What we are up against is not really the pressure of events, not the many demands on our time, but a stubbornness within ourselves, a hard-heartedness that will not yield to transformation and change.

Setting aside a morning, a day, even a week or more for spiritual retreat is one of the most strengthening and reinforcing experiences of our lives. We need to yield. We have to bend. Once we embrace the spiritual disciplines, we are carried along, often, by a storm of grace. Giving way to the power of spiritual disciplines becomes a step toward freedom, a movement into the wide-open spaces of the sons and daughters of God.

Retreat—with all of its prayerful beginnings and renewals—can become a step into reality. On retreat we may discover our true identity not from any self-analysis but by God's gift of enlightenment.

The spiritual disciplines are ways to truth, stepping stones from our furious activity into God's calm and peace. When we have crossed over on the stepping stones, we escape into the life of grace. Then and there it is the Lord who teaches us. The power of God

is leading us. Soon we hardly know where God leaves off and we begin.

How to Use Wilderness Time—This book raises and answers practical questions, yet the aim is not practicality as such but rather personal transformation in Christ. Hope of such transformation moves us into a place apart, a time of prayerful separation from daily pressures and cares. Transformation is God's doing—not ours—yet it happens because we choose it, in this instance by going apart for reflection and prayer.

People sometimes suppose that a special reason is needed to justify making a retreat. We assume that a retreat needs to be made on a certain occasion. In fact, no more reason is needed than that your heart longs for greater closeness with God—because you are worn out by many annoyances and worries, and you are seeking the refreshment of God's presence; because you need rest from the anxieties of ordinary living, even from the legitimate responsibilities imposed by family, work, and church; because you want to follow the example of Jesus in going apart to pray.

There are many different ways to make a retreat, but this guide will emphasize the creative process of making a private retreat according to your own design.

The approach will be contemporary, Christian, and biblical, imitating Jesus and his followers and being guided by their clearly established practices of going apart to pray. We also will draw on recent sources, suggesting readings from contemporary as well as ancient writers.
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1. Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet (New York: Seabury, 1972), 4.
2. John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), 538.

Excerpted from chapter one of Wilderness Time (San Francisco: HarperCollinsSanFrancisco, 1997).

Emilie Griffin has written five other books on the spiritual life: Chasing the Kingdom, Clinging, Turning, The Reflective Executive, and Homeward Voyage. Now a free-lance marketing consultant, she and her husband, Bill, live in New Orleans.