Billy Ray’s Forty Days

by Frank Roderus

“You sure this is what You had in mind, Lord?” asked Reverend Billy Ray Halstad on the dusty, lonesome ride into Purgatory City. Only a minister who’d been truly saved from his past would commit himself to preaching in a dilapidated, drafty church to a congregation of unfriendly parishioners in an isolated ghost town. Billy Ray Halstad had never felt more lonely than he did those first forty days in Purgatory City, and began to question whether he’d lost his calling to do God’s work.