What Summer Taught You
The Season Isn’t Over. Neither Are You.
Dear Friends,
There’s a moment in August that most people feel but can’t quite name. The light changes. The pace shifts. Something in you knows the season is turning, and before it does, you find yourself looking back at the months behind you.
That feeling isn’t just nostalgia. It’s an invitation.
What Did You Build This Summer?
I opened Guys, Guns, and God with a question most men quietly wrestle with: are you becoming who you were made to be, or are you just staying busy? Summer has a way of answering that question whether you’re ready or not. Three months go by, and either something grew or it didn’t. Your relationships, your faith, your character, your sense of purpose.
Proverbs 13:4 puts it clearly: “A lazy person’s desires remain unfulfilled, but an honest, hard-working person’s desires are fully realized.” Summer isn’t a vacation from becoming a better man. It’s three months of opportunity dressed in sunlight.
What the Range Teaches You Off the Range
If you’ve spent any time shooting this summer, you already know that accuracy doesn’t happen by accident. It takes presence, discipline, and the willingness to be honest about where your last shot landed. You adjust your sights and try again.
Life works the same way. The same qualities that make you a responsible, accurate shooter, patience, focus, personal accountability, are the ones that make you a better husband, father, and man. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: guns don’t build character on their own, but the discipline required to handle them well has a way of spilling into everything else you do.
As this summer closes, ask yourself where your sights need adjusting.
The Wisdom in Slowing Down
Real growth requires quiet. Not inactivity, but intentional stillness. Time to reflect, to ask hard questions, to sit with what isn’t working and decide what comes next.
Before the calendar fills back up with fall obligations, there’s a window. A chance to ask: what do I want the next season to look like? What needs more of my attention? What have I been avoiding?
Proverbs 4:7 says, “Getting wisdom is the wisest thing you can do.” Wisdom doesn’t arrive on its own. You have to go looking for it, and the end of summer is as good a place as any to start.
The People Around You
No man grows alone. Whether it’s your wife, your kids, a men’s group, or a trusted friend, the people in your life are part of your story in ways that outlast any single season. As summer ends and families gather back around school schedules, dinner tables, and routines, there’s a real opportunity to show up more intentionally for the people who matter most.
“As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend” Proverbs 27:17. That’s not a metaphor to read and forget. It’s a standard to live by.
One Season Ends. One Begins.
The end of summer isn’t a loss. It’s a handoff. What you carried through these months, the lessons, the growth, the mistakes you learned from and the ones you’re still working through, all of it gets handed forward into fall.
You cannot choose to be born, but you can decide how to live. That decision doesn’t happen once. It happens at the end of every season, when the light changes and something in you knows it’s time to recalibrate.
The next chapter is coming. Make it a good one.
Stay encouraged—your story is still unfolding.
Randy Abramovic
Author, “Guys, Guns and God”
