Chapter: From Road to Nowhere to No Way Out
The chrome and glass of the Queen City Diner—known by the truckers on the “Triple Deuces” as the “ROAD TO NOWHERE DINER”—gleamed under the afternoon sun. It was 1974. Mark steered his ’63 Falcon Coupe into the lot, parking next to David’s hulking ’68 Oldsmobile station wagon. They stepped out in their simple denim and identical green T-shirts, the baby Zondervan Bible pouches swinging slightly on their hips. They knew this was the place for a cheap meal because they heard the chatter every morning—if you’re hungry and don’t care about the ambience, eat at the Road to Nowhere Diner.
Inside, they slid into a booth, the vinyl cool and slightly sticky. The air smelled of sizzling onions and stale coffee. They ordered their usual: a hamburger, fries, and a Coke for Mark; a cheeseburger meal for David. It was a small luxury, a brief respite from the constant calculation of the fellowship house budget, where nine people lived on whatever temporary work the day provided.
Mark pushed his plate aside, unzipping the leatherette case on his hip. He pulled out his slim, well-worn baby Zondervan, the kind with whisper-thin onion-skin paper. The pouch was tight—it couldn’t fit anything else except for the handful of colored Flair pens nestled inside, which some of the brothers carried to imitate Stewart’s intense study methods. David retrieved his identical Bible and pens.
“So about what Stewart said Friday night,” Mark started, carefully turning the delicate pages, “the part about marriage. It’s not about two people becoming one—it’s about three becoming one, with Jesus as the center.”
David nodded, taking a bite of his fries. “Yeah, I was looking for it in Ephesians… chapter five. Stewart was pointing out that the love between a husband and wife is the same kind of mystery as the relationship between Christ and the church. It makes so much sense when you see it that way.”
Mark located the passage first, running his finger under the tiny print. “See? It makes all the temptation, all the worldly pressure, just fall away. We’re not trying to find ‘the one’ who completes us; we’re trying to find a fellow disciple who is as dedicated to centering in Jesus as we are.”
David’s face broke into a wide, genuine grin of relief and affirmation. He snapped his Bible pouch shut and gave a firm, simple thumbs up across the table to Mark.
“Man, I’m just so glad Stewart broke that down for us. It simplifies everything,” David said, finally sinking into his cheeseburger meal. “It’s all about the center.”
In that moment, in the noisy anonymity of the Road to Nowhere Diner, the world was simple. The truth was a tangible thing you could hold in your hand, thin as paper but solid as rock. The future was a path you could see, and the only thing required was to stay on it.
Fifteen years later, the path had vanished. The simple, three-becoming-one truth of marriage had been systematically dismantled, replaced by a decade of escalating rules, prohibitions, and psychological torment. The year was now 1989. The setting was no longer a vinyl booth in a public diner but a rigid chair in a closed, windowless meeting hall. The cheap meal was a distant memory; now we were being force-fed a new, terrifying doctrine.
This was the “Open Season” meeting, though we wouldn’t have called it that to our faces. It was the “Grace Meeting,” the one where Stewart, flanked by his wife Gayle, would finally address the “colossal error” of the last twenty-five years. The air didn’t smell of coffee and onions; it smelled of stale carpet, collective anxiety, and the faint, metallic tang of fear.
The ratio of voices had changed. In the diner, Mark and David had a dialogue, a 50/50 exchange of discovery and affirmation. Here, there was only one voice. Stewart’s. It was a monologue that stretched for hours, a tidal wave of words that drowned out any thought before it could fully form. Studies would later show he spoke an estimated 88% of the time. Our role was no longer to discuss, but to absorb.
The tools were the same, yet different. We still had our baby Zondervans, now worn soft as cloth, the onion-skin pages bristling with a decade of frantic Flair-pen notes. But we weren’t using them to find simple truths. We were using them to keep up, to frantically cross-reference the new, convoluted logic Stewart was spinning, trying to find the anchor in a storm of his own making. He was confessing to years of “verbal and emotional abuse,” but framing it as a theological topic to be dissected, not a sin to be atoned for. He was the victim, and we were his jury.
The dialogue was gone. In its place was a relentless, dizzying lecture. Stewart spoke of “transferring allegiance,” a concept so alien and absolute it made our heads spin. He wasn’t simplifying the world; he was atomizing it, breaking it down into a million pieces of his own design and demanding we reassemble reality according to his new blueprint. The thumbs-up of 1974 had been replaced by the hollow, mandatory “Yeeesss” that rippled through the room, a sound not of agreement, but of surrender.
I looked around the room at the faces, many of which I had known since those early Allentown days. The earnest hope in their eyes had been replaced by a dull, glassy confusion. The simple certainty of the “Road to Nowhere Diner” had led us, step by step, to this place with no way out. The same man who had given us the simple key to unlock the mystery of marriage had now padlocked the door and thrown away the key, telling us the lock was our fault.
The feeling was no longer relief and certainty. It was a profound, disorienting trauma. The mind, once a tool for seeking God, was now a prisoner of a man’s whim. The cheap meal of burgers and Cokes felt like a feast from a lost world, a world where the truth was something you found, not something you were handed moments before it changed again.
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