Billy Ray Halstad was just another hard-working miner with a taste for some harmless hell-raising. Then one fateful Saturday night he found himself face-to-face with a preacher feller that told him sinning isn't all it's cracked up to be. To Billy Ray's surprise, the message took. Now he's actually got money in his pocket come Sunday morning. He's got something else, an urge to spread the good news.

"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.