One of my kids’ favorite singers is Noah Kahan. Do you know him? He’s a sort of folk-pop singer and has several good songs, one of which is called “Stick Season.” With all the pines around here, we don’t really have a stick season, but up in Vermont, where Kahan is from, they sure do. It’s that depressing season up there in late autumn after all the pretty leaves have fallen and turned brown and before snow covers the ground. The color is all gone. Everything is bare and blah. All you can see is limbs and sticks. Kahan sings of the stick season like a wound, and anyone who has weathered a hard season recognizes the feeling.

Apostle Paul knew a stick season of the soul as well. In 2 Timothy 4:21, he asks his friends to do their best to come see him before winter. The reason he needed them is that, as he says in v16, “At my first defense no one came to stand by me, but all deserted me.” Every human support had fallen away, like leaves stripped bare.

And yet verse 17 turns: “But the Lord stood by me and strengthened me.” He didn’t say, “The Lord fixed everything,” or “The Lord removed the cold.” No, the Lord stood by him in the very bleakness. Paul goes on: “The Lord will rescue me from every evil deed and bring me safely into his heavenly kingdom” (v. 18).

This is the promise for your own stick season—the bare, lonely stretch where people forget to call, and the color hasn’t returned. God is not waiting for spring to show up. He stands by you in November and every season and strengthens you!

Change begins in you!