I grew up in the Philadelphia area, which means one thing: I am a Wawa person. It’s not just a gas station or a convenience store—it’s a way of life. Hoagies, soft pretzels, coffee that fuels the city, and the kind of loyalty that only Philadelphians can muster. If you know, you know.
Now here’s the twist: I married someone from Western Pennsylvania. And in Western PA, Wawa doesn’t exist. Sheetz reigns supreme. For her, Sheetz is the place of midnight runs with friends, touch-screen ordering before it was cool, and fries that come in a bottomless variety of toppings.
Around here, the question “Are you Wawa or Sheetz?” isn’t small talk—it’s basically a cultural identity marker.
Discovering the Corridor
Here’s where things get complicated. I went to college in Sheetz country. For the first time in my life, I was forced to live without Wawa. And you know what? I came to love Sheetz. Not everything about Sheetz (let’s be honest, it’s not always Wawa-level on coffee), but enough that I get the hype. I understand the obsession. I love Sheetz. I go there whenever I can.
And then there’s the corridor. The thin strip of Pennsylvania, stretching through the Lehigh Valley, Reading, and Harrisburg, where the two worlds collide. The sacred ground where Wawa and Sheetz coexist. Where you can grab a Wawa hoagie and a Sheetz MTO in the same day. Where you don’t have to choose.
This, my friends, is the promised land. The kingdom of convenience.
But before you stop reading to go Google where exactly this corridor of heaven is, let me be clear:
This is not a blog about convenience stores.
Breaking Out of the Binary
Our world is addicted to binary thinking. You’re either one thing or the other. Conservative or progressive. Traditional or modern. Pro-this or anti-that. Every opinion becomes a loyalty test, every belief a virtue signal that neatly drops you into one pre-packaged box or another.
But that’s not how the world really works. And it’s definitely not how the Kingdom of God works.
Jesus didn’t fit into the boxes people tried to put him in.
He wasn’t “all in” with the Pharisees or the Sadducees.
He confounded both Rome and Jerusalem.
He welcomed tax collectors and zealots into the same disciple band.
Jesus lived in the “corridor” between labels, the deep middle where God’s new creation breaks in.
The Corridor Life
To live in the Kingdom of God is to live like you’re in the Lehigh/Reading/Harrisburg corridor—fully able to taste the best of both worlds without collapsing into the false choice of one or the other.
You can be both truth and grace.
You can love holiness and justice.
You can care about personal transformation and social transformation.
The Kingdom calls us to a “both/and” life. Not a shallow compromise, but a deep integration. The kind of life that refuses to reduce God’s vision to human categories, because God’s Kingdom doesn’t belong to one camp or the other—it belongs to Jesus.
So maybe the next time you feel pressed to “pick a side,” remember the corridor. Remember that the Kingdom isn’t Wawa or Sheetz—it’s Wawa and Sheetz.
It’s the deep middle where heaven and earth overlap, where God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.
Grace and Recovery 