There are no deserts within easy driving distance of here. But there are hills; big, wide hills covered in scrub trees and wildflowers. When it comes to desert experiences, you take what you can get. A desert is not required for a desert experience. In fact, as I quipped to a friend over lunch recently, oftentimes if you do not have a desert of your own, one will be provided for you.

You go into the desert to get away from everything, from the jumble of daily life and the lumber of everyday thought. In the desert, there's no clutter; there's nothing to take up your mental space. There's just you, and God, and the desert.

When you simplify the equation like that, one of the primary realizations that people often come to is that this is how life really is all the time: just you, and God, and some other stuff. It's helpful to push all the other stuff to the side once in a while, to reduce it to its bare essentials of sand and stone and sky. You can come to grips with things. But like I said, if you don't have a desert nearby, you make do.

I drove out on the morning of Palm Sunday to the Texas Hill Country, my desert of choice. The Hill Country in Spring is a stunning sight; vast carpets of wildflowers--Bluebonnets, Indian Paintbrushes, Winecups, Phlox, Buttercups--erupting everywhere you look, on hillsides and in cow pastures and on highway medians. The Live Oaks and Ashe Juniper trees are coming to life; the world is shot through with color. I passed through North Austin, through the suburb of Cedar Park, and then suddenly I was in the middle of nowhere, traveling west on lonely State Highway 1431. 

There is a moment in every journey of crossing-over, when the known gives way to the unknown. When you pass straight through the intersection at which you have always turned right or left, and discover what lies beyond it. In those crossing-over moments, the heart leaps. Who knows what might lie beyond the next bend in the road?

I drove, with the Peter Gabriel sountrack to The Last Temptation of Christ blasting out of the car stereo, with the windows rolled down, sun on my face. The music felt earthy and potent, like rich alkali soil. I crossed over.

I was on a personal mission of sorts. A mission not from God, but after God. I was going to smoke Him out, figure out what He was after. My heart was burning. I shouted out the window: "I'm coming for you! I'm coming for you, you bastard!"

There is nothing wrong with being angry at God. It happens. It's what you do with that anger that matters. I wanted to put paid to it, once and for all.

Get a hammer and some nails and try to nail God down. Or better yet, don't bother. It turns out that it's not possible. Not even kind of.

I had angry thoughts swimming in my head, kicking their feet down into my heart and bruising it. I wanted to know just what the hell I was doing working part-time at a Methodist church, and why I hated it so much. Why I resented it. Hating the job wasn't part of the plan; it wasn't in the job description. I didn't know why I hated it; I just knew that the larger part of me wanted to stop. Stop pretending. I don't know what I was pretending; that's how it felt. I wanted to know why I felt so inauthentic there, why this chosen direction seemed to be taking me not closer to where I wanted to be, but somehow further away. It was maddening.

"Where do I belong, God?" I shouted over the stereo. "Where am I going?" I paused for a second and added, "You bastard!" for good measure.

If there comes a time in your life when you feel the need to call God a bastard, I can recommend it with some reservation. It feels good, but the effects linger. It's like throwing something valuable at the wall and shattering it during a fight; it feels good while you're doing it, but later you might wish you hadn't.

There's a little restaurant in Marble Falls called the Bluebonnet Cafe. Marble Falls itself is not quite a tourist attraction; it's a stopping point between here and there, between cities like Austin and San Antonio and the big man-made lakes where city dwellers come to time-shared lake houses on the weekends to unwind and wonder furtively what became of their youth.

Texas requires certain things of you. If you stop in Marble Falls, you have to eat at the Bluebonnet. And if you eat at the Bluebonnet, you have to have chicken-fried steak (I don't know why they bother cooking anything else, if they even do). And when you're done, you have to have a slice of pie. I did all that. I wasn't about to screw around with the voice of tradition.

In the middle of ordering my chicken-fried steak, I glanced down at the bottom of the menu and read the line, "Sorry, no credit cards. Cash only." I didn't have any cash; I rarely do.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't have any cash. What can I do? Is there an ATM nearby?" I was hoping she wouldn't say "dishes."

"Oh, don't worry about it, honey. After you eat, you can run up to the machine on the corner."

I worried anyway. When I was done eating, I flagged down the waitress and said, "Okay, I'm going to get some cash; I'll be right back. Do you want to hold onto my drivers license or something?"

She slapped my shoulder. "Oh, honey. I trust you."

I got back on the road and drove south, heading in the general direction of San Antonio. At some point I planned to break off and head West, toward Kerrville. I remembered being in Kerrville and it being an idyllic sort of place, like a little corner of Colorado that snapped off in a heavy wind and landed a few hours south of Lubbock.

I drove past so many churches that day. They were everywhere I looked. Sleek, modern Lutheran churches and white clapboard Lutheran churches with iron fences. Tiny country churches out in the middle of nowhere with names that rang like old gospel hymns. In Marble Falls there is a squat, clunky Methodist church and a prim Baptist church and a stern, proud Catholic church, and some others with names hand-painted on wooden signs that hung from rusted iron signposts.

Outside Sisterdale, it started to rain. I pulled over to the side of the road and communed with a flock of mouflan sheep. They stood on their side of the barbed wire fence, eyeing me, their mouths half-open and stuffed with new grass. Behind them was a collapsed barn, its red slats crumpled in on one another and faded to dull orange. I stared at the sheep. They stared back. Then, as one, they turned and strolled away, some of them bleating sour notes of disappointment and disapproval.

I drove through a town called Comfort and almost wept at the profound irony of that name. Comfort implied anything but. It was muddy and dark and gloomy. Interstate 10 runs directly over it, a vast miles-long overpass that literally passes over the entire town, as though the modern Interstate was afraid of touching something so old and dirty.

I found myself on a winding country road whose designation I no longer remember. It was a seesaw of hilltops and low-water crossings. Sheep and cattle lined the roads, a few horses in paddocks looked on from the ranches that dotted the hillside. Every time I rose to the crest of a hill, there was a brief moment of excitement, anticipation for what might be on the other side. The fact that it was, without fail, yet another stretch of barbed wire and sheep and cow patties and low water crossings never bothered me.

One tiny town, whose name eludes me if I ever learned it at all, appeared to have been abandoned wholesale by its inhabitants and left to rust at the side of the road. I saw refrigerators--their original owners would have called them iceboxes--leaning against mailboxes and decrepit Buicks and Oldsmobiles and Studebakers rotting in a heap behind a low chain-link fence. There was not a single person in sight, and the only sign of life in the entire place was a single incandescent bulb glowing feebly in the window of the gray prefab VFW hall.

I finally stopped in Fredericksburg, halted by the rain. Fredericksburg is an old German-themed tourist trap that consists of about four blocks of antique shops and German restaurants and Texana boutiques. Almost inconceivably, in the midst of it is an enormous building in the center of town with a giant mast and a sign that reads, "Museum of the War in the Pacific."

I called my wife and told her that I was still trying to figure things out. She said she loved me and it felt good to hear it. She was away for the weekend with the girls, visiting her mother in Dallas. Standing under an awning in Fredericksburg, surrounded by the noise of tourists and rainfull, she seemed incredibly far away.

One week earlier I'd been standing in the gallery outside the sanctuary, when one of the young adults for whom I was the nominal Young Adult Minister approached me. In front of a sizeable crowd, he let me know in no uncertain terms what a bad job I was doing, and how my priorities were totally flawed, and how I was wasting my time on some people when I should have been spending it on others. I was stunned. I said a few milquetoasty things and beat it into the sanctuary, where I sat and fumed for the next hour, the worship service going on blithely without me.

Two days after that, I was in my office at home, furiously putting together the lesson for my final Lenten Study session. Easter seemed immeasurably distant. I'd taken the day off from my day job in order to get the lesson prepared. I wanted it to be really good. My three-year-old came into my office. "Do you want to play with me?" she asked, holding out a stuffed animal.

"Not right now, sweetie. Daddy needs to do some work now. Okay, baby?"

She was disappointed, but she let it go and trudged out.

Two minutes later, she was back. "Come play with me, Daddy," said, tugging on my shirt sleeve.

"Not right now, baby. I have to finish this."

Two minutes after that: "Daddy, come play with me. Pleeeeease!"

"Enough!" I snapped. "I'm trying to work. Would you just go play by yourself for awhile?" I didn't try to hide my irritation.

She started to cry and ran out of the room. I chased after her, found her sprawled on the couch. "I'm sorry," I said. "Daddy's sorry." I picked her up and held onto her as tight as I could.

This is fucked, I thought.

And now here I was in Fredericksburg, in the rain. I drove to another church and parked in front of it, staring up at its tall spire. I considered going up and trying the door, looking around for a priest, someone with magic words that would make sense of it all. It was still hours before sunset, but the clouds and the rain made everything dark. The church looked foreboding, not welcoming at all. I started the car, put it in reverse, and backed out of the spot.

By this point, I was exhausted. All my exhilaration and determination had been leached out of me. It seemed a fool's errand to continue on to Kerrville. I turned right onto highway 290 and headed back to Austin. It was night by the time I got home.

As soon as I walked in the door, I picked up the phone and called my boss at the church. I told her I was quitting. She was very nice about it.

The following Sunday was Easter Sunday. We'd avoided the church all week. We hadn't participated in any of the Easter week services, and the Easter service itself seemed like an anticlimax; like watching the last half hour of a movie that we hadn't sat all the way through. I felt awkward and too visible. I felt disconnected and sad. I felt angry and disconcerted. Everything going on up at the altar seemed to be taking place in another building, another city.

I don't work for a church anymore. I still have my day job. I still have this calling to do . . . something. I still want to go to seminary, still want to keep writing, keep thinking, keep going.  The Sunday after Easter, we lived like heathens. We slept late, went out for breakfast, lolled around. Last Sunday, I visited a MegaChurch and that is a whole other story. Next Sunday, who knows?

I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know if we'll stay at that church. I don't know if I'm even a Methodist anymore. I'm a . . . something else. Some kind of lunatic Christian who sometimes believes in miracles and calling God a bastard and dancing around arks and poking around in the dark places and trying to love God and seek Truth and trying to balance it all and never quite succeeding. That's the place I'm in.

And you know what's really strange? It turns out this is a pretty wonderful place to be.