Pop, pop. Skeet, skeet. Blap, blap

Dashboard drama, emotional overload, and perfectly timed mercy

It was one of those impossible conversations.
The kind you rehearse a hundred times.
Words catching in your throat like glass.
And once they’re out, you can’t unsay them.

No matter how many times I prayed, the silence stayed.
Because sometimes, clarity isn’t the problem.
Courage is.

That morning, I didn’t feel brave.
I just felt done.

And wouldn’t you know—that’s exactly when Miss Betty Breakdown, the Hot Mess Express, decided she had enough too.

I backed out of the driveway, heart pounding, hands shaky, halfway rehearsing what I was going to say… when my car made the sound:

Pop pop.
Skeet skeet.
Blap blap.

I paused. Then the dashboard lit up with four warning lights I’d never seen before.
It felt like a group text I didn’t ask to be in.

I didn’t panic because I didn’t know what to do.
I panicked because I didn’t have anything left in me to figure it out.

It felt like God was saying, “Wait. Not yet. Trust Me. Don’t lean on your own understanding.”

When I pulled into the mechanic’s lot, tears were already threatening.

The guy came out calm, wiping grease off his hands.
I said, “Okay, so… it went pop pop. Then skeet skeet. Then, I swear, a full blap blap. Followed by four emoji on the dash.”

He nodded like he’d heard worse. Then said, with the straightest face:

“Was it more of a pop like popcorn, or a pop like gunfire?
On a scale from soda fizz to engine beatboxing, where are we landing?”

I laughed.
And maybe that was the first time I’d exhaled in days.

He didn’t treat me like I was dumb.
He didn’t roll his eyes.
He just listened.
Translated the chaos into something I could understand.

And standing there, still wrapped in that impossible conversation I had been carrying around, I realized…

Maybe what I was rehearsing was just like the dashboard.
All noise. All pressure. All warning lights.
None of it translating well.
Just… blap blap.

And then I thought about Balaam and his donkey.

Balaam was rushing into something harmful.
But God stepped in his way.
It looked like delay.
It felt frustrating.
But it was mercy.

Maybe God wasn’t being silent with me either.
Maybe He was saying:

“Not today. Not like this. Not until you're stronger.
I see what’s ahead, even if you don’t.”

Maybe mercy sometimes looks exactly like delay.
A dashboard full of nonsense.
A mechanic with dry humor.
A holy interruption.

Sometimes the SOS you prayed for shows up in the form of inconvenience.
Sometimes rescue sounds like blap blap.

Scripture:

“A person’s heart plans his way, but Lord directs his steps.”
— Proverbs 16:9 (NASB)