Book excerpt: This book, On the Road to Manhood, is an effective tool that will not only answer essential questions many men have, but will provide a clear map for entering that path and successfully traveling it. To achieve that goal this book will assist the careful reader to begin finding the way towards understanding himself. There are few lessons in my life that have had more resonance within the deeper places of my soul, than the profound, priceless message locked in the words of that "weeping prophet," Jeramiah, who made that often quoted and pride-less confession, revealing a degree of vulnerability rarely matched in this age, "Oh Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself, it is not in man that walks to direct his own steps" (Jerimiah 10:23). It saddens me that I spent so many years living recklessly, outside of a properly developed faith. When I consider how far away from the Lord I was, I am blessed that God did not allow death to usher me into the grave, while I wandered aimlessly in sin. It was not until after I had slid down that slippery slope from prominence, as it were, to despicableness, I discovered how very little I knew about truth, reality, good or God. One day it occurred to me, as I pondered Jeramiah's struggle that I, myself, was ill-prepared for the life of godly peace and power, because I was living under the illusion that I knew that vital something about manhood, with which I was only vaguely familiar. Have you ever been in that place in your own mind? That frame of mind where you think you know more than you really do; but you don't know that you don't know? Where because of your proximity to a truth, you think you know the truth? I am referring to that awful place of deception, where the enemy of our faith has tricked you into a sense of false peace and ease. A place where you even think that everything is just fine, everything is alright, while in reality you may be living in the far country, outside of Christ, disconnected from the God of heaven, and really only a step away from destruction. You ever been there? Well thank God if you have not, but if any of you, like me, have been anywhere near that dark place, then you know what false peace feels like. And then, maybe you also know how it feels when your eyes begin to open to the reality of your predicament, I most certainly do. When you begin to experience the feelings associated with being lost, hopeless, empty. You know the pain, the hurt that floods a lonely soul, when you realize what you have done to yourself, when you see what has become of you. I can tell you from my own experience, that there is not a moment quite like that moment when all pride is thrown aside, when the blinders fall off, and just for a moment you can see a truth that had previously alluded you. God had been bringing you to this moment (he sure did me), but pride and sin kept getting in the way, keeping me from seeing it. And then it hits you all at once, as if a loud speaker goes off in your mind, when you finally get it clear in your mind that life is meant to be more than the life I am living. What a hard pill this can be to swallow, especially for the individual who has become accustomed to not seeing or facing himself. As well for the one who does not yet know or understand the powerful truth in the simple phrase, I am nothing, absolutely nothing without God.