WESTERN WISDOM Season 4, Episode 013, "Ghost Town Lives" audio podcast by award-winning western author Stephen Bly. Sponsored by BlyBooks.com Legacy Series.
"Got a Ghost Town Near You?" blog post article found here: https://www.blybooks.com/2022/09/ghost-town/
Sign Up on BlyBooks.com on blog page to receive RSS feed by email for podcast blog notices. Related blog article with podcast embed will arrive every Tuesday and Thursday. Look to the right of the LINK PAGE for “Subscribe to the Blog via Email” and “Enter your email address”.
Would greatly appreciate if you a) SUBSCRIBE, b) RATE, c) REVIEW the podcast.
PODCAST WEBSITE URL: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1777501
FULL PODCAST INFO: https://bit.ly/3xCxckS
Music by WinkingFoxMusic from Pixabay
Related blog article email link with podcast embed most every week.
This podcast always free but donations welcome to cover costs.
Send to PayPal at janet@blybooks.com
Bly Books Website: https://www.blybooks.com
GHOST TOWN
Stephen Bly
Circa 1995
A couple hours from where I lived, there once existed one of Idaho’s most booming frontier towns. Florence was settled in 1861 with the discovery of placer mines on the southwest side of the Salmon River canyon. And by 1862, ten thousand people had reached the settlement.
At its peak, Florence produced about $50,000 worth of gold every day. Even when the mining played out, folks hung around and the post office was still in service until 1912.
Oh, there’s not much left in Florence nowadays. No permanent residents. Most buildings have disintegrated back into the hillside, but I always find it interesting to stay in a ghost town and try to imagine what it was like in its better days.
Idaho has its share of ghost towns. Some lasted only a few months; others for decades. Some were deserted almost overnight. Some were torn down and moved, piece by piece. Some burned to the ground. A few are still standing there. In most places you can find a trace of what used to be a thriving community.
Sometimes I run across people whose lives are sort of like ghost towns. All I find now are traces of what used to be a prosperous person, what used to be a successful family or promising career. For them, the best days are long past and there seems to be no hope of success ever returning.
The truth of the matter is that’s kind of the condition where Jesus finds each one of us.
Paul says, “Remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12).
We may at one time been without hope and without God, but we were never worthless. Our value has never been in our inherent goodness or our talent or our replaceability. Our worth is in the price God was willing to pay for us. And the Bible says, “You are not your own. You were bought at a price” (1 Corinthians 6:20).
The new owner wants to come in and rebuild the old ghost town of our lives. And He will construct it right. If we allow Jesus to rebuild us, we will end up with a permanent structure. And that will be a whole lot better than being a broken-down symbol of what something used to be. That’s much better than becoming a spiritual ghost town, destined for destruction.