These Dry Bones

By C.L. Snowe

Charlotte grew up in the church. She accepted Christ as a teenager. She knew and believed the gospel. Her life wasn’t perfect, but the story of her journey made sense. She knew who she was.

And then during her freshman year of college, something bizarre and completely unforeseen happened. A switch flipped in her head. And somehow, her brain stopped working right.

She spent the following years wrestling not just with mental illness, but also with the implications of what being bipolar meant for her as a Christian. Her diagnosis felt like a chasm between herself and the church, and sometimes between herself and God. How could someone bipolar, who felt like such a mess in so many ways, also be a Christian?

This is the story of one young Christian’s experience learning to live with mental illness, and how God used even the darkest parts of her life to grow her in Christ and teach her more about the nature of his love and mercy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C.L. Snowe
• Release date: Jun 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463045985

Book preview

These Dry Bones

C.L. Snowe

Copyright 2019 C.L. Snowe

All rights reserved.

For everyone who has ever wondered if God could honestly love someone like you.

He can. And he does.

Table of Contents

Title

The Dulling of Freedom

In a Foreign Land

Lazarus

Spinning

The Gift and the Giver

Overlap

The Betrayal

These Dry Bones

Falling

Calling It By Name

Between Worlds

A Morte Dos Sonhos

Beginning Again

He Works All Things

Then What?

The Dulling of Freedom

Perhaps it’s trite, but I’d like you to start this journey with me by playing a game of imagination.

Imagine a prisoner. He has been trapped in a cell underground, completely isolated from the world. There is no sun. There is no change in the day-to-day sounds and actions. The very air is stale.

Then the day finally comes, maybe even unexpectedly, when he steps into freedom for the first time. He sees everything. Hears everything. Tastes everything. There’s no such thing as a small experience. Sunshine, rain, grass, voices, flowers, cars – it’s all vibrant and powerful, and probably overwhelming. And while the rest of the world accepts it as normal (doesn’t even notice it, really), freedom is something palpable to that prisoner.

But then time passes. The prisoner joins the rest of the world. Gets a job that is sometimes irksome, has a neighbor who is always noisy, discovers that he has allergies and curses the very flowers that bedazzled him on that first day of freedom. He is no less free, but the vibrancy of that freedom has worn off. The sharp edges of freedom have dulled.

That is where this story begins. Perhaps someday I will write down the story of the prisoner being set free; it is, after all, the most beautiful story of my life. But for whatever reason, it is not the story I am compelled to write today. This story begins two years later, once freedom had faded into the back of my mind. I was sixteen years old, and had been a Christian for two years. When you’re sixteen, two years is a long time. Looking back, I think I can cautiously say that I understood freedom in Christ better than most Christians my age. I don’t mean this to be a prideful statement; too much time has passed, too many failures have passed, to bother with pride in my sixteen-year-old self. This will, in fact, be a story largely about those failures, but I feel the need to set the stage first.

I lived in a small town, surrounded by family and friends. Some of those friendships were with Christians, and some were not. I had friends who were atheist, pagan, Mormon, and many friends who frankly didn’t know what they believed yet. My friendships were a bit atypical of most people’s friendships at that age; they had deep roots. Roots deep enough that eighteen years later, some of those people are still among my closest friends.

And that, I suppose, is a good place to begin. Because when I think back on this story, it always seems like it began when I left those friends behind.

In a Foreign Land

When my parents first threw out the possibility of moving from our small town to a big city, it was a completely unexpected thought, but not an entirely unwelcome one. I was disturbed, but not distraught, when it became a reality. I had a preconceived image in my mind of glitz and palm trees and beaches, and when we visited prior to the move, the image seemed to hold true.

I could spend a lot of time chronicling my family’s six months amongst that glamorous world, but frankly, it wouldn’t be that interesting for you to read and it would be unpleasant for me to write, so I’m going to save both of us the trouble and keep to the highlights. Beyond that, I'll just say that the reality of the experience was pretty awful.

The culture shock was more severe than I ever could have anticipated. I showed up in jeans and Birkenstocks to a school filled with girls in spandex and high heels. My mom dropped me off each morning in a parking lot filled with sports cars. Not only was I uninterested in