Ghost Town Soul

Visit a ghost town, and you’ll see that only the skeletal remains of old hotels, saloons and stores remain, some of them barely standing. It’s a metaphor for the sometimes barren landscape of our souls.

“How deserted lies the city, once so full of people” (v. 1 NIV).

These might be the words of a tourist who is visiting Animas Forks, Colorado, or Bannack, Montana.

These two towns are no longer towns — at least not in a conventional sense. They’re “ghost towns,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “a shadowy semblance of its former self.”

Perhaps you’ve journeyed through the “Old West” and come across a few of these towns. They dot the landscape from western Kansas to central California. You can find them in western Nebraska, southern Wyoming, the mountains of Colorado and throughout Montana.

Many of them are former mining towns. And many conjure up the classic, if hackneyed, image of a town that once was a “lively, lawless frontier boomtown with whiskey-slinging saloons, fast guns and even faster women, one-room jailhouses and rickety, wooden boardwalks.”

Maybe. But now, “how deserted lies the city, ...