October settles over Kendall County like a quilt. The mornings begin to carry that crisp air we’ve been waiting for, the trees start to hint at turning, and you can smell fires drifting from backyards and campsites. Football fills the evenings, deer blinds are cleaned and stocked, and the calendar fills with fall festivals, church bazaars, and community events. It’s a season that hums with activity, yet it also whispers something quieter if we’ll let it.
Stillness.
I don’t mean idleness, and I don’t mean giving up the work that’s in front of us. Stillness is different. It’s the discipline of slowing your heart long enough to hear what really matters. In a world that tells us to run faster, chase more, and fill every empty minute, October invites us to step back.
I’ve felt that need more and more in my own life. When I was younger, I believed being a man meant always being on the move. Stack the wins. Keep the schedule full. Don’t let anyone see you pause. But that kind of living runs a man ragged. You don’t notice it at first, but the frayed edges show up in the way you snap at your loved ones, or how you feel bone-tired even after a full night’s sleep.
The truth is, God didn’t design us to carry the load at a dead sprint forever. He gave us the gift of Sabbath. He gave us seasons. And He gave us the reminder, in Psalm 46:10, to “Be still, and know that I am God.” Stillness isn’t weakness. It’s where strength is renewed.
In Kendall County, stillness often looks ordinary. It’s a man with a cup of coffee on the porch before the sun rises, listening to the first crow of a rooster down the road. It’s an hour in a deer blind when nothing walks out but squirrels, and realizing the time wasn’t wasted. It’s slipping into a pew on Sunday morning, not with words to say, but with ears to hear. It’s walking the banks of the Guadalupe after a long week, breathing in air that smells of cedar and limestone.
Those moments don’t announce themselves. They won’t trend on social media. But they are the places where clarity comes, where you remember what’s truly important: your faith, your family, your community.
I’ve seen it in the men we’ve written about in this magazine. Every one of them carries responsibility, but the best of them also know how to be still. They take the time to pray before making a hard decision. They know the value of sitting with their children without rushing off to the next thing. They’ve learned that the quietest hours often shape the loudest legacies.
October also gives us the reminder that time is passing. Another year is sliding toward its close. It’s worth asking: have we lived with intention, or just speed? Have we left room for quiet, or have we drowned it out with noise?
There’s a reason the old-timers sat on their porches as the day wound down. They weren’t lazy. They were wise. They knew the land, the weather, and the work would always be there tomorrow. But the people in front of them, their children, their neighbors, their community, needed them to be present that day. Stillness makes presence possible.
My encouragement to you, as we step into October, is simple: carve out time to be still. Guard it as fiercely as you guard your work or your hobbies. Let the quiet of a Hill Country morning teach you what hurry never will. Put the phone down, look your wife in the eye, linger at the dinner table. Sit with your son after practice, even if you’re both too tired to talk. Those are the moments that write a man’s story.
The Kendall Gentleman has always been about more than articles and advertisements. It’s about calling men to live deliberately, to protect, to provide, to pray, to lead. Stillness is the soil where all those virtues grow. Without it, we run the risk of becoming men who achieve much but mean little.
So this October, take the invitation that’s already written in the changing of the season. Slow down. Step outside. Be still. And know that the God who made these hills is still at work in you, in your family, and in this community.
I’ll see you down the road,
Michael G Ethridge
Publisher
From the publisher: stillness is not the absence of motion, it’s what makes motion possible. For the resolve that stillness sustains, read The Resolve That Built Us. And for the purpose that makes it all worth it, The Pursuit of Purpose is a good place to sit with it.
