When the Car Won't Start and Neither Will Your Sunday Plans
A tale of dead starters, imploding anxiety, and the peace I forgot I already had.
It was a perfectly lovely Sunday. Church was good, the goodbyes were warm, and the sermon, ironically, beautifully, almost too on the nose, had been all about anxiety. About releasing it. About resting in Christ's peace instead of white-knuckling your way through life. I nodded along. I felt convicted in the best way. I walked out of that sanctuary feeling lighter.
And then I turned my key and heard nothing.
My car wouldn't start.
Now, I've been around long enough to know exactly one thing about car problems: it's always the battery. That's just science. Dead car equals dead battery, you jump it, you go home, you make a mental note to get it replaced and promptly forget. I was already mentally dialing AAA and patting myself on the back for having the membership when the technician arrived, checked things over, and delivered the bad news.
"It's not the battery. Looks like your starter."
The starter.
As in, the tow-truck-required, fundraiser-missing, grocery-pickup-abandoning kind of car problem. I had a fundraising event in an hour. I had a grocery pickup I was already late for. And now, apparently, I had a very expensive paperweight sitting in a church parking lot.
This is the part where I wish I could tell you I remembered the sermon. That I took a breath, opened my hands, and rested in the peace I had been sitting under not twenty minutes before.
Nope...not me!
Instead, every commitment I had that afternoon began stacking up in my mind like a pile-up on the freeway. The fundraiser. The people counting on me. The groceries. The timeline. The dominoes falling one by one. The anxiety that the sermon had so gently addressed came roaring back, not as a whisper, but as a pressure building from the inside out, the kind that makes you feel like every wall is closing in at once.
I was supposed to be somewhere. I was going to let people down. I had no idea if any of it , any of it , was going to happen. And somewhere between the AAA technician and the tow truck dispatcher, I completely forgot that I didn't have to carry all of that alone.
The tow truck driver arrived, took one look at the situation, and suggested we try turning it over a few more times, because apparently starters can get stuck and sometimes they just need a little convincing. I was skeptical. I was also desperate. So we tried.
IT STARTED!
I cannot fully explain what it feels like to hear your engine turn over after you have mentally accepted that your Sunday is completely derailed. It is somewhere between elation and sheer annoyance, because while you are thrilled, you also know deep down that this problem has not gone away, it has merely gone quiet.
A car that doesn't work is the worst kind of problem: unpredictable, inconvenient, and expensive in that particular order.
Fast forward to this morning. I dropped the car at the mechanic, who, in a twist that will surprise no one, doesn't actually think it's the starter either. So now I am carless, diagnosis-less, and staring down a day that includes kid pickups and golf lessons.
This is where I have to stop and say something genuinely grateful: my in-laws are an absolute blessing. Without a second of hesitation, they stepped in to help chauffeur our family around. No complaint, no drama, just love in action, the kind of support that makes you realize how much you rely on your village, and how grateful you are when it shows up.
Looking back, I can see the irony so clearly it almost makes me laugh. I sat in a sermon about anxiety, agreed with every word, and then walked straight into a situation tailor-made to test it, and failed immediately.
But maybe that's the point.
Peace isn't something you absorb in a service and carry out perfectly. It's something you reach for, sometimes forget, and reach for again. I forgot to rest in it on Sunday. I'm still learning to rest in it now. And somehow, in spite of all the chaos, the car started, the family got where they needed to go, and not one thing that actually mattered was lost.
A perfect reminder that the pressure I feel is not from God, but from my own fear of being perfect.
