So I'm late for work; the baby is crying; the little girl has woken up in a puddle and is screaming bloody murder; the television is tuned to CNN; words and figures are flashing all over the screen. There's no time to make coffee, hardly time to kiss everyone goodbye. Sometimes everything moves too fast and everything that I want to see, hear and think gets jumbled and frayed around the edges.

I need to find a treetop and pray.

We all do, and regularly. What constitutes a treetop is largely metaphorical. It is that place where we can shut out the world and try to come to our senses, try to come to God with something other than our scattered thoughts and half-understood prayers. That something is deliberateness. Climbing to the top of a tree is a deliberate act. Fasting, meditation, yoga--these are all deliberate acts. I believe we are at our most human and our most godly when we are behaving deliberately.

How can you be deliberate when your boss is hounding you for the report that's three days late, when the dentist's office calls and tells you you've missed your appointment and they're going to charge you anyway but insurance won't cover it, when your family is harassing you for pictures of the new baby on pain of death; pictures, you shamefully admit, that haven't been taken and you fear never will be? And oh, shit! You forgot to return the video that you never even found time to watch, and you forgot to go to the grocery store to get milk, and now everyone has to eat their cereal and drink their coffee without it, and they're all looking at you, sullenly, as if you personally pissed in the milk carton instead of simply failing to replace it.

When you've reached a wall in your life, it's nearly impossible to decide what to do about it if, while standing at the wall, you're endlessly fighting off little mice and squirrels and rabbits and various other wild creatures that skitter about at the foot of the wall, whose sole intention, it seems, is to distract you and sap your energy.

When you've reached a wall in your life, you can either try to scale it, or you can turn around and look for another way around. Those are your options. The skittering wildlife doesn't care one way or the other; they just want you to hang around for awhile so they can sink their teeth into you for a bit, drink a little of your blood. Climbing your tree is how you get rid of those annoying creatures for a bit. You can get the lay of the land up there, try to get a sense of what's on the other side of that wall, and whether it's worth climbing in the first place. The mice and squirrels and rabbits can't get to you up here. And it pisses them off when you start climbing; they chatter even more loudly, threaten you with their bared teeth, but you have to ignore them and climb anyway. They'll be just as eager to nibble on your toes when you get back. They'll wait.

My personal history contains very little climbing of walls, and lots of turning back and looking for other paths, lots of sitting in trees glowering at woodland fauna.

But I have climbed a few walls; I know what it's like. I finished a three-hundred page novel a little while ago. It wasn't easy at all, but I wasn't going to let myself turn back. There were times when I wanted to. There have been problems in my marriage, difficult ones, potential deal-breakers; my wife and I scaled those walls together, a rope tied between us.

But I've skirted more walls than I've climbed; I admit this. When I graduated from college, I wanted to pursue a PhD in Literature, but I didn't get in to any of the schools that I applied to; I didn't apply to a safety school and so I didn't go to graduate school that year. Instead of regrouping and hitting the wall again the next year, I moved on to something else.

I wanted to be a working musician for a time; I played the bass guitar pretty well. The band I was in recorded a CD, then it broke up. I tried to form or join another band. I tried moving to San Francisco to become a solo folk artist; tried moving to Los Angeles to start yet another band. None of these things worked. I told myself and my then-girlfriend (now wife) that if nothing happened in a year, I'd quit for good. Nothing happened. I quit.

I started writing seriously after we moved back to Texas. I wrote a short story every month; I belonged to a writing group and we started a website. People liked the site and we used it as the launching pad for a small publishing company. I wrote that novel I talked about. A few people bought the novel, but most didn't. I'd be surprised if more than thirty people have actually read the thing. The publishing company fell apart and my fiction writing career dragged, stalled.

I decided that I wanted to be a pastor, and I started down that path. I got a job at a church. I started this website, chronicling the details of this particular journey. I wrote my first sermon. I taught a class at the church. And here I am at the wall again.

The problem is that I don't particularly enjoy working at a church. I don't like it that much. There's too much administering and not enough ministering. This is not a property of just the church at which I happen to be employed. Teaching classes about passion and atonement to a handful of people who clearly could not care less what you're talking about is . . . well, it sucks. I get the feeling that the people who hired me aren't sure about me--maybe they expected me to be somebody else, maybe they find my personality offputting, maybe I'm just imagining the whole thing. The point is that I've only been working there for a month part-time and I'm already starting to dread it. This is not a good sign.

This cloud has a big silver lining--I'm not a pessimist by nature. It's beginning to appear to me as if, very close to the wall I'd intended to scale, is another wall. A different wall that leads to much the same place.

What's that, you ask? Well, you're reading it. It's this . . . web . . . thing. Correction. A website. When I started writing about this faith journey, I thought that the writing was merely a means to an end, a way to help keep tabs on myself as I went along. But as I read more, and write more, and think more, I find that it is the writing that I look forward to. It is the writing that moves and motivates me. It is the writing that most nearly captures what it is that I want to do and how I most want to be pleasing to God. This is not what I had expected. I thought that maybe writing was something that I was putting behind me, another wall that I never managed to fully climb.

Now, don't get me wrong. A website, a blog even, is not a vocation. It is a public space for thoughts. It might be of interest to some, might even inspire someone from time to time, but nobody makes a living doing it. But there are writers, writers who write about spiritual things, writers like Annie Dillard and Philip Yancey and Dallas Willard and Anne Lamott and a whole cavalcade of others who've managed to eke out a living and a life writing books about faith, honest books about human beings and God and what that all means. More and more I find myself wanting to be one of those people, and not one of those people who wears a robe and baptizes people and gives a sermon on Sunday.

There's more to this. I have problems with the church. Pretty serious problems. While navigation the Ministry Inquiry Process, I've come across some statements in the United Methodist Book of Discipline that I find deeply troubling. One, of which I had not been aware, is a prohibition against gay marriage. UMC pastors are not permitted to perform them. Some have done so, and have been disciplined by the church for it. I don't know if anyone's lost their job over it, but I'm sure it wasn't a joyride. I don't want to keep my mouth shut about the things I believe in. I want to shout them from the rooftops. I want to sing out loud the things that make my heart sing. I don't want to hide behind a pulpit and say only the safe things that I know will not alienate some members of my congregation.

And coming to a new church has been difficult. Really difficult. We miss our friends, our sense of connectedness. The people at the new church just aren't like the people at the old church. We think that maybe once we get to know them better that our opinions of them will improve, but so many of them seem so conservative, so unspirited, so uninterested. This is a hurdle that I don't relish overcoming. Even though my mom always told me it was important to make new friends, I never listened. I don't like making new friends. I like the old friends much better. I'm not sure if I can uproot myself every four or five or six years at the whim of the bishop for the rest of my career and force myself to go through that grief and soreness and awkwardness that finally leads to familiarity, just in time to go through it all again.

If I decide that "no, this isn't for me," I know that people are going to snicker behind my back. If we go back to our old church, people will talk. They may take me less seriously in the future. Nobody likes a quitter. But I have to give myself permission to not be a Methodist pastor if that's what it turns out is right for me. Right now, I don't know. Nobody else knows, either. I'm certain of this because I've asked most of them to tell me exactly what it is I'm supposed to do and no one has given me a definitive answer.

And then if I say, "I want to be a religious writer, or inspirational writer, or whatever the hell it is that I want to be," this also causes trouble. There aren't salaried jobs for such people. Well, there are; it's just that those salaried jobs have nothing whatsoever to do with writing. Writers like me work during the day at some vaguely unfulfilling job and then come home at night and drag themselves to the computer to do the thing that makes them tick. This is not a great job. There are worse jobs, but at least they have better hours.

Here's what I want to do: I want to write books that you will treasure; that you will take off the shelf from time to time when you're feeling a little down and read over the passages you've underlined and feel better. I want to say a true thing now and then that makes you think, "Aha! Now I get it!" I want to get you thinking about what it means to be a person, a person of flesh and a person of spirit. I want to make you laugh uncontrollably and make you cry. I want to help you a little further along on your walk, however that happens. I don't know exactly how to do all of those things, but I know that if I don't try to do it somehow, that there will be one wall that I will always have regretted not climbing.

All of these things that I'm telling you come scattered and halting through the wild sounds of small woodland creatures heckling and biting and scratching. That's why I need to climb a tree and get away from them. I can't think here, at the base of this big wall.

In a few weeks, my wife and daughters are going to go visit my mother-in-law for a few days. Hopefully when that happens I can find a tree and climb up it for 48 hours, ponder all these things. Maybe I'll have an epiphany. If God wants to put a bright star in the sky to lead me somewhere, that's cool, but I'm not going to fret over it. As Anne Lamott succinctly puts it, "God is not a short order cook." No, I'm just going to climb my tree and try to take a closer look. Sometimes when you do that, God spies you and invites himself over to your house for dinner. Most of the time, though, you just get some fresh air, and some distance from all the little furry things that keep you from living deliberately. And most of the time, that's enough.

If I can, I'd like to ask for your prayers--or if not prayers, then good wishes, or positive energy, or good karma--in this struggle. I'm off the map here, I fear. Being off the map can lead you to new discoveries, but it's also where the sea serpents and dragons live. "Here there be monsters."