Ghost Town Lessons--August 18, 2017
"Some take pride in chariots, and some in horses, but our pride is in the name of the LORD our God. They will collapse and fall, but we shall rise and stand upright." [Psalm 20:7-8]
Let me tell you about a lesson I learned from a ghost town.
The year was 1865, and oil was struck near a creek on a wooded hillside in western Pennsylvania, just a few miles from where they had first found oil at Drakes Mills a few years before. Because of the boom in investment in drilling for oil at Drakes Mills, people rushed to this new spot, too, hungry to cash in on what they expected to be another gushing deposit. With a matter of months, some 15,000 people had swarmed to the spot, building a little town, which took its name from the nearby creek... which in turn supposedly took its name from a curious crack in the ground nearby that everybody knew about (and half-suspected was an entrance to hell). And thus, Pithole, Pennsylvania was born.
Alas, after a high-point of 20,000 people had created a bustling down, and after the oil boom came and went, prices dropped, and speculators picked up and left for other places, within twelve years the town had shrunk back to almost nothing and went unincorporated. Before long the woods reclaimed the town, and today there is a visitor center there and volunteers who mow the grass that grows where the town's roads used to be. Pithole--yes, pronounced "pit-hole"--Pennsylvania came and went in less time than elapsed between the last two Rocky movies. And now a gift shop and road sign marks what had once been the location to be at for people who wanted to get rich and make their fortunes.
If you find yourself driving through Venango County, Pennsylvania, make a point of stopping yourself sometime--and learn from the haunting scene of a town reclaimed by the trees. And if you should stop, let it sink in: this is the best that money, or power, or popularity, or fame, or possessions can get you. They may show up in your lap, but they are a flash in the pan, and then they are gone. Try and build a lifetime on them, and they vanish. Try and build something stable on them, and they crumble beneath you and return to the loam before long.
I don't know what the people of Pithole in its heyday thought they were doing or how long it would last, but it seems to me that they were only thinking as far as the next well, or the next barrel. They never dreamed their supply would run out or that prices would collapse. No one ever does. But when it turned out that the great fortunes to be made in the oil business were more mirage than money-in-the-bank, at least there in that spot, everybody left. And the great bustling boom town of Pithole, PA returned to the woods.
I hear that historical lesson in the back of my head when I consider these verses from the psalms. In the end, the things we think (think!) are solid and dependable--things like horses and chariots perhaps in one era, or oil derricks and barrels in another, or smart-phones and 401(k)s in our day--these things simply cannot be counted on. They don't last. They don't live up to any guarantees. They don't endure. And if we place our trust in stuff like money, profits, weapons, wealth, or our piles of stuff, we are setting our sights too small and too short.
So often that's our problem--we can't look beyond whatever things are right at hand, right in the moment, whatever is immediately around us, and we pin our hopes and put our trust in them. It is myopia of the soul--short-sightedness about what really matters and what truly lasts. And the voice from the psalms is that whether it's horses or handguns, power or possessions, these things simply won't prove reliable. The bubble bursts, the security that was promised dissolves, the peace of mind we were counting on evaporates. And if we are only able to focus the eyes of our hearts on the immediate, it will take us by surprise when those things happen.
It's the politicians who can only see as far into the future as the next election. It's the newly married couple who assume they can get the McMansion right away in their adult life and then get up to their eyeballs in debt. It's the tendency in all of us only to care about the people immediately in our awareness--people who live in my neighborhood, or look like me, or think like me. We have this way of seeing only what it is immediately at hand and then having the things we put our trust in disappear beneath our feet.
But the people of God are given a gift--like a pair of glasses to correct our vision. We are given the capacity to see beyond the immediate--to see and think beyond just me and my stuff, me and the people like me, me and the short term. We are given the ability to see beyond just what is good for me, beyond what feels good in the moment, beyond just caring about people who are "like me," and instead to have our vision expanded.
Grace gives a new way of seeing that is always further--further out in time, and further out around me. It means we ask less and less, "What's good for just me?" or "What will get me through the day... or the year?" and more and more we will ask, "What is good not only for me but also for a child in China, a university student in South Africa, or a struggling single mom on the edge of poverty on the other side of the country?" It means we not only ask, "What's the short-term pay-off?" but also, "How would this affect my grandchildren and the world they will inherit?"
Today, what if we let the Mercy of God--the one thing that is reliable in this messy universe--put new lenses in front of our eyes, so that we can see not just the immediate, local need, but also to see wider and deeper and further... so that we can think beyond a boom in business for a few months, or the short term market gains on the nightly news.
Today, the living God offers us a cure for the myopia in our hearts. It is worth taking it.
Alas, after a high-point of 20,000 people had created a bustling down, and after the oil boom came and went, prices dropped, and speculators picked up and left for other places, within twelve years the town had shrunk back to almost nothing and went unincorporated. Before long the woods reclaimed the town, and today there is a visitor center there and volunteers who mow the grass that grows where the town's roads used to be. Pithole--yes, pronounced "pit-hole"--Pennsylvania came and went in less time than elapsed between the last two Rocky movies. And now a gift shop and road sign marks what had once been the location to be at for people who wanted to get rich and make their fortunes.
If you find yourself driving through Venango County, Pennsylvania, make a point of stopping yourself sometime--and learn from the haunting scene of a town reclaimed by the trees. And if you should stop, let it sink in: this is the best that money, or power, or popularity, or fame, or possessions can get you. They may show up in your lap, but they are a flash in the pan, and then they are gone. Try and build a lifetime on them, and they vanish. Try and build something stable on them, and they crumble beneath you and return to the loam before long.
I don't know what the people of Pithole in its heyday thought they were doing or how long it would last, but it seems to me that they were only thinking as far as the next well, or the next barrel. They never dreamed their supply would run out or that prices would collapse. No one ever does. But when it turned out that the great fortunes to be made in the oil business were more mirage than money-in-the-bank, at least there in that spot, everybody left. And the great bustling boom town of Pithole, PA returned to the woods.
I hear that historical lesson in the back of my head when I consider these verses from the psalms. In the end, the things we think (think!) are solid and dependable--things like horses and chariots perhaps in one era, or oil derricks and barrels in another, or smart-phones and 401(k)s in our day--these things simply cannot be counted on. They don't last. They don't live up to any guarantees. They don't endure. And if we place our trust in stuff like money, profits, weapons, wealth, or our piles of stuff, we are setting our sights too small and too short.
So often that's our problem--we can't look beyond whatever things are right at hand, right in the moment, whatever is immediately around us, and we pin our hopes and put our trust in them. It is myopia of the soul--short-sightedness about what really matters and what truly lasts. And the voice from the psalms is that whether it's horses or handguns, power or possessions, these things simply won't prove reliable. The bubble bursts, the security that was promised dissolves, the peace of mind we were counting on evaporates. And if we are only able to focus the eyes of our hearts on the immediate, it will take us by surprise when those things happen.
It's the politicians who can only see as far into the future as the next election. It's the newly married couple who assume they can get the McMansion right away in their adult life and then get up to their eyeballs in debt. It's the tendency in all of us only to care about the people immediately in our awareness--people who live in my neighborhood, or look like me, or think like me. We have this way of seeing only what it is immediately at hand and then having the things we put our trust in disappear beneath our feet.
But the people of God are given a gift--like a pair of glasses to correct our vision. We are given the capacity to see beyond the immediate--to see and think beyond just me and my stuff, me and the people like me, me and the short term. We are given the ability to see beyond just what is good for me, beyond what feels good in the moment, beyond just caring about people who are "like me," and instead to have our vision expanded.
Grace gives a new way of seeing that is always further--further out in time, and further out around me. It means we ask less and less, "What's good for just me?" or "What will get me through the day... or the year?" and more and more we will ask, "What is good not only for me but also for a child in China, a university student in South Africa, or a struggling single mom on the edge of poverty on the other side of the country?" It means we not only ask, "What's the short-term pay-off?" but also, "How would this affect my grandchildren and the world they will inherit?"
Today, what if we let the Mercy of God--the one thing that is reliable in this messy universe--put new lenses in front of our eyes, so that we can see not just the immediate, local need, but also to see wider and deeper and further... so that we can think beyond a boom in business for a few months, or the short term market gains on the nightly news.
Today, the living God offers us a cure for the myopia in our hearts. It is worth taking it.
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