Welcome to another edition of the Five Minute Friday link-up! If you’re new, you can click here to learn more about the link-up and how it works.

This week’s FMF writing prompt is: LIMIT

Setting my timer for five minutes, and GO. 

You guys.

You know how some people say, “God will never give you more than you can handle”? Well, I disagree. I believe we always have more than we can handle in our own strength — that’s the whole point of needing the Lord, right? Admitting that we can’t do anything on our own, including and especially saving ourselves?

And you know how some people say, “When it rains, it pours”?

Well, it’s been raining fairly steadily over here, and this morning, my own emotional dam broke from the volume of accumulated water.

I turned on my computer to start my work day and was greeted by the black screen of death. Yep. Spent an hour and a half trying to troubleshoot via text message with a friend, only to determine I will most likely need a new hard drive (but he will only be able to confirm the diagnosis on Saturday night).

I’m pretty sure I haven’t backed up my laptop in more than two weeks, maybe three. Amongst many other things, this means I lost sixty pages of editing work I had completed for a client (out of a 90-page manuscript due Monday).

My emotional limit was breached. In conjunction with the many other things happening, this loss pushed me over the edge.

I’m very aware that this is such a small problem compared to so many who are suffering with far greater severity, and I certainly don’t mean to inflate my minuscule trials by comparison.

It truly could have been so much worse.

STOP.

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I ran out of time, but when I chose this word, the following passage came to mind and inspired my choice of graphic for this week’s prompt: 

“Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb,
when I made the clouds its garment
and wrapped it in thick darkness,

when I fixed limits for it
and set its doors and bars in place,
when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?”

Job 38:8-11, NIV

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Set a timer for five minutes to write with abandon on the writing prompt, LIMIT, then click the blue button below to share your work! Then visit your link-up neighbor to read their post and leave an encouraging comment: