The story goes on with a lengthy description Nathan's apology for his wickedness and his rudeness to the ministers who tried to save him from himself. The ministers exhort the congregation to pray fervently for him, because the Devil is going to try all the harder to drag him down.

Amy, probably. Stop looking at her sandals.

You know it isn't going to last, right?

And that's what's really heart-breaking about this story. This little guy needs a daddy. And his daddy needs some serious support through his struggles with depression, which starts showing some obvious signs before too long.

So here's where the first cracks begin to appear.

OK, class. Let's put our thinking caps on. Can you think of some reasons why Nathan may not have been super enthusiastic about having Bible studies with Harold and Paul?

I'm going to guess that he feels that it's probably a waste of time to sit down with two people who shut him down every time he asks a question that doesn't adhere to the party line.

If he asks a question they don't like, they're gonna be all shocked and horrified. This Bible study is not going to differ from what Nathan has got for the last 30 years. No wonder he isn't interested.

And notice two things.

1) Paul's immediate response is judgment. "Wow! He must not be sincere if he doesn't want to study the Bible with us." 

2) There's no attempt to find another way to help him. No offer to get him books, or find a correspondence course, or the suggestion of how another Bible version might help. There's not even a sense of urgency or insistence. They didn't say, "Well, why don't we give it a try? How does next Thursday sound?" They didn't do a SINGLE THING that showed him care or consideration. Instead, they followed the old pattern of setting themselves up as spiritual giants, and experts, and him as the project.

Yeah, maybe Nathan should have gone for it. But it feels like he's done a lot of sucking it up, and the only time they are really concerned about what's actually going on inside is when he's got on foot on the running board of his Peterbuilt. (yeah, that's how they spelled it.)

Once again, Nathan shows signs of depression and despair, and the response is "Welp! Hope things get better. Keep hanging in there, and don't truck."

There's nothing wrong with the ideas that Harold is sharing. It's the attitude, and lack of compassion.

If Nathan was my nephew, I'd tell him, "Look, I get it. It's really tough right now, but you're doing the right thing. Look how happy Amy and Matthew are to have you home every evening. This isn't for you, it's for them. And I promise you, things get better. By the way, have you considered talking to a medical professional about your depression? I can help you look for a good one if you'd like."

But they didn't. Suck it up, Nathan. That's the message.

This is a fascinating passage. On the surface, Nathan should be exhilarated to have the weight of a month's truck payment off his shoulders. But he isn't. Why?

The author depicts Nathan's reaction in a negative light, of course, and I partially agree. Maybe he should have acted more grateful. But look at what is going on under the surface.

1) Nathan is struggling with depression. As a result, he undoubtedly feels like a total loser at life. Being sent money to make a truck payment is just more evidence to him that he is, in fact, a loser that the voice in his mind tells him he is. That's why he comments that feels like a charity case.

2) Look at who the gift comes from. Amy's family. Now, you know what Amy's family probably thinks of him. He abandoned their daughter. He went off trucking and left her alone. And now that he's home, he can't pay his bills, so they have to step in.

I'm not saying that giving the gift was wrong, or even that it came from a bad place. But it likely feels like a direct attack on Nathan's manhood and ability to provide for his family.

In my opinion, it would have been better to reach out to him and talk man to man. "Hey, Nathan, I'm guessing times are tough right now. We've been thinking. How about we float you a loan for a few months of truck payments, and then you can pay us back when the truck sells." This would have helped Nathan, while treating him as an equal.

3) This is another entry on the invisible ledger. This is something that happens a lot in these communities. People keep internal ledgers. Nathan has been a taker. The whole community has been worrying about him and his family and praying for them, and he's probably never going to be on the plus side of the ledger again. He feels like a burden, and this check is just one more thing that they are all going to remember. They had to bail him out. He's not their equal.

Once again, this is a situation where it's not about Nathan and what he feels and what he needs. His needs are getting ignored and he's falling through the cracks.

And notice that last sentence. Nathan doesn't feel free to talk to Amy about the "desolation in his own heart." It would just drag her down.

And so the spiral continues.

This passage is incredible to me.

It's such a perfect description of Nathan's inward turmoil that you feel that the author must truly understand him. Yet there is no sympathy for his struggles.

Sorry, Harold, but a truck with a For Sale sign in the window selling isn't really that powerful of a sign. And it's really sad that the main thing you're thinking at this moment is how Nathan needs to be showed how BAD his idea REALLY IS, rather than encouraging him at a time when he probably needs it.

Do you hear that sound, Amy? That's the sound of your marriage dying.

This is the moment that I believe Nathan passes the point of no return.

He's tried one last time in this painful, lonely experience to open up about what's going on inside.

And instead of saying, "I don't understand but I'm here for you. That has to be tough,"

Amy is aghast. Aghast. Filled with horror and shock.

And Nathan walks away knowing he's not being understood, and that it's never going to happen.

If Amy had been like a godly lady that I know, she would have said something like this: "I know it's tough. You spent a lot of time in that truck. You're letting go of something you've dreamed about most of your life. I can't say I understand, but that doesn't mean that I don't feel for you. I'm sorry you have to go through such a hard thing, but you're doing the right thing. You're doing it for me, and for Matthew, and it makes us feel so loved right now. Hang in there, Nathan. This is the first day of our new lives together."

But Amy doesn't say any of that.

Amy is aghast. Amy doesn't understand. And Nathan walks away and sits alone in his inner darkness.

Are. You. Kidding. Me. Right. Now?

Why would Nathan open up to someone who is aghast every time he is vulnerable?

The fact that this story went through the hands of several reviewers and copyeditors before going to print, and this stunning indictment of Amy's blindness made it to print without being clarified or redacted is powerful evidence of an overall blindness in the upper echelons of Mennonite culture.

Nathan is to blame, and that is that.

In the end, Nathan returns to trucking, and the story closes with Paul and his father sadly discussing this final turn of events. 

In the movie version, Paul and Harold are sitting on their back porch, looking out across the lawn as the sun sets. Harold quotes some Bible verses about a pig returning to the mud, and they discuss whether there is any hope for Nathan. Harold looks at Paul for a long time. "Only a total and complete surrender on Nathan's part will deliver him from the snare of the fowler," Harold declares, putting the blame squarely on Nathan's shoulders for the last time.

Father and son sit in the darkness in silence as we fade to black.

For a second, we think the movie is over, then the camera cuts to a parking lot, lit by a few pole lights. A lone man is walking across the lot, whistling softly to himself, his boots crunching in the gravel. The man climbs into a shiny new Peterbilt and closes the door. A moment later, the engine starts and the headlights come on, bathing the parking light in a white glare.

The camera cuts to the interior of the truck cab. Nathan's face is illuminated by the lights from the dash. He puts the truck in gear and smiles for the first time in a long time as he pulls onto the road. The camera pans down and we catch a glimpse of a photograph of Matthew and Amy propped on the dash before the camera zooms out for a long shot of the truck heading down the road into the night.

Credits.

That's an unusually long passage to open with, and normally I would cut it short and summarize, but I think it's important to include because it sets the stage for this chapter of the Nathan saga.

Tension is building between Nathan and his wife, and he is depicted as caring more for his son than for his wife.

The thing that frustrates me is this: How was Nathan supposed to greet Amy? Paul was standing right there. If he had embraced her, or kissed her, that would have been inappropriate, in Paul's eyes, and he may have suspected the outward expressions were intended to hide the deeper issues in their marriage. (That is literally preached ALL THE TIME by these ConMen.)

Yeah, I guess he could have smiled. But there's not enough information here to draw a major conclusion. 

Anyhow, Paul ends up staying and the tension evaporates as the evening progresses, and Nathan tells stories about his experiences on the road. To Paul, they seem "hollow stories." No doubt stories of the mundane events at the welding shop are much more fulfilling than "hollow" trucking stories.

OK. This one can go two ways, and maybe Nathan is in the wrong here. But maybe it's a case of everyone contributing to the problem.

On one hand, Nathan may have an axe to grind with Amy for any number of reasons, and resent her asking questions because he doesn't respect and honor her.

On the other hand, given the air of suspicion around his trucking, and the assumptions everyone has that he's up to no good, it's possible that Amy's questions are loaded, and that Nathan resents being grilled every time he comes home from a trip.

Both possibilities are equally possible here, and while, in the long run, I have some sympathy for Amy, she is a product of her culture, and she definitely contributes to Nathan's alienation by failing to understand and support him at key moments.

AHA! YOU'RE TELLING ON YOURSELF!

Boy, is that last sentence ever telling. The fact is that the church is powerless to stop Nathan from trucking, and they aren't even willing to try.

But how can the church be powerless? They regulated every detail of Nathan's life from his clothes to how he conducted his wedding. But they can't stop him from trucking, because if they try, they know he will leave.

Controlling groups are always like this. I watched this happen at the religious college I attended. The people who didn't care if they were there or not got away with everything, and the college bent the rules to their whims, while the students who desperately wanted to be there were hounded and nit-picked over every minor detail.

Ostensibly the ministry needs the immense power they are vested with to help people do the right thing, but it turns out that when the power will actually do some good, like helping Nathan's marriage, or preventing child abuse, as opposed to protecting the world from a rampant outbreak of errant elbows and dually trucks, they are completely powerless, and if this doesn't lay bare the lie at the heart of the ConMen system, you are probably willfully blind to it.

So, the church leadership, knowing that Nathan can't be brought to heel by their usual strong-arm tactics, is forced to stand by, wringing their hands and hoping to the Lord that something changes, and conveniently forgetting all the guarantees that they made to Nathan's parents that if they would walk in the paths of the church, everything would be A-OK.

I have nothing to say in Nathan's defense here. I do wish that he had someone in his life that he could actually talk to, who would help him articulate what is making him feel so restless and so irritated when he comes home.

If I would hazard a guess, I would say that Nathan enjoys the hours and days on the road out from beneath the all-seeing eye of the church and its agents, and that coming home and being back in that environment is super frustrating and causes conflict for him.

If this is the case, it is obviously something he needs to work out with Amy, but the ability to feel safe while communicating frankly about his feelings appears to be non-existent.

With that said, he's not treating his wife and kid right, and that's not OK.

Skipping ahead, the church eventually says enough is enough and excommunicates Nathan. I assume that this is the result of an ultimatum of some kind, which he fails to honor.

Time passes, and Paul's father decides to give Nathan an alternative to his trucking job by offering him a job in his welding shop.

Nathan acts uninterested at first, then surprisingly accepts the offer.

This is an interesting turn of events, and one that raises a lot of questions for me.

Clearly, Nathan seems to be trying to stay connected, and may be feeling the alienation with his family and want to remedy it. He's clearly willing to give up his lifelong dream of trucking to give welding a try, so as to rebuild the relationship with his family.

The fact that he is willing to work for his uncle, even though he is excommunicated indicates the lengths he is willing to go to in order to try to make it work, and bridge the gap.

Once again, we see Nathan trying, in his stumbling way, to find some kind of equilibrium in his life. He clearly cares about his family, and wants to be the man he should for them.

OK. So maybe that first sentence wasn't accurate.
I think it's strange that Nathan is continually depicted as restless and unsettled and can't commit and jumping from one thing to another, when it's clear that the guy is able to hold down a trucking job for years on end.

Maybe the problem wasn't that Nathan got tired of welding. Maybe the problem was that Nathan had all he could hack of MennoStuff in three months and remembered why he wanted to go trucking to begin with.

You know how it had to have been, as an excommunicated man, working shoulder to shoulder with these people for months at a time, constantly watching his words and the stuff he talked about and knowing what they think of him.

Three months was long enough.

I would guess that very few of my readers who have left a strict community like Nathan's would last more than three months working for an employer in that community.

So let's talk about what's happening here. I want to start out by saying that Nathan is kind of being a jerk for a few reasons.
1) Any job has rules about acceptable conduct on the job, and if he was asked not to listen to the radio, and he did anyway, that's not OK.
2) Nathan is being a troublemaker. He knew what the expectations would be when he took the job, and he chose to ignore them.
3) He was being sneaky about his violation of the rules, and hostile about his employer's requests.

Now, with that said, I also think that it was a little unfair for Harold to make those requirements of Nathan. They were completely unnecessary. He could have said, "Hey, I get that you're not a church member, so whatever you listen to is on you, but I don't want you playing the radio when my employees are around."

I can't help but feel that, as important as Amy having Nathan at home allegedly is to them, their church standards are more important, and that's really sad.

Nathan decides to go buy himself a truck and become an owner-operator, because that's where the real money is.

So he gets himself a bright red (of course) Peterbuilt (yes, that's how they spelled it), and he's off to the races.

Of course a new truck means payments, which means more time on the road, and soon, Nathan is gone for weeks on end.

Amy doesn't complain because she knows that she was warned about his inclination to trucking.

Then one day...

This is a prime example of the gritty realism and believable characters that Mennonite literature is so famous for, and I hate to break into the middle of this ultra-realistic conversation, but I simply cannot forbear.

Obviously this conversation is meant to indicate that Nathan had a free and loose and frequent association with this hair-dyeing clerk.

But everything about this exchange is cringe turned up to 11.

Nathan isn't half as suave as he apparently thinks he is, and both of them are laughing so uproariously at something that is so mundane and non-humorous, that I wonder if Nathan is unable to tell the difference between someone laughing with him and someone laughing at him. Either that, or the clerk is REALLY into him.

In the real world, this is simply not the way this conversation would go.

More likely would be something like this,

***
Nathan: How come your hair changed color?
Clerk: Are you serious right now? There's this thing called hair dye women use sometimes.
Nathan: Oh, yeah. I think I read about that in a Gospel tract once.

Awkward silence.

Clerk: That'll be $5.73

More awkward silence.

Nathan pays.

"Thanks."

The clerk doesn't respond.

"Have a nice day."

No response.

Nathan walks out the door in awkward silence.

Fade to black.

***

But we must stay true to the narrative laid before us. Nathan and this unnamed clerk are in the midst of their peals of laughter when Paul rounds the corner.

In the movie version (starring Adam Sandler as Nathan and Patrick Adams as Paul), this is where the Imperial March starts playing.

This is something that really bugs me about conservatives. They make you feel awkward about doing innocuous stuff, by acting weird and judgey about it, and then interpret your discomfort as a sign that your conscience is bothering you, when the fact is they're just being weird.

Take watching movies for instance. I don't feel weird or convicted or condemned or guilty about watching movies, but I would never watch them around my conservative family, and if they suddenly walked into my house while I was watching a movie on my big screen, I would quickly turn it off and feel awkward because I would know all the thoughts they were thinking, and how they were debating if they should warn me about the state of my soul or something. So they make everything awkward. And I know that when they left, they would sadly talk about how I know that it's not good, and that's why I looked so guilty, because their consistent testimony convicted me.

I don't blame Nathan for bugging out. What was he supposed to do? Stand around in the parking lot shuffling his feet and pretending he wasn't chatting with the clerk, all the while knowing that Paul knows and is all concerned, but is going to just make small talk and pretend it never happened?

There's no point. And all the little games like this are one of the things I really enjoy not missing about being part of the ConMen.

Amy, I gotta award this point to Nathan. You DON'T know how to have fun. I mean, I've read your literature, and I know what your churches promote and the very idea of fun is frowned on.

So you can be sad that he WANTS to have fun instead of being sober and reserved or whatever, but don't be complaining that he says you aren't fun, because you aren't. You aren't allowed to be. So it looks like you have a decision to make. Is the church right, or not? (Spoiler alert: they're not)

OK. This is plain ugly, and I will never excuse a man abandoning his wife. Even if Nathan did feel the need to move out, because of the tension in their marriage, abandoning his wife and son is plain wrong.

This is why I have said from the beginning that I definitely do not approve of or support the wrong road that Nathan goes down. But I will also reiterate that I feel that this course was not inevitable and that the community contributed to it in a thousand different ways.

For months, the church prays for Nathan that he will repent and return to his family, and that fall, Nathan calls Paul to inform him that he is repenting. His truck broke down and he was stranded in the middle of nowhere, and realized that he had no money and no friends, and basically recapitulates the story of the Prodigal son.

He repents and decides to return home and give it another try.

He's going to come home.
He's going to give up his dreams.
He's going to sell the truck.
He's going to settle down.
He's going to submit to the church.

Stay tuned for the final installment, where we learn if Nathan actually is able to hang in there, and whether his family assists him in that commitment.