One evening, as I sat around the table with a handful of my buddies, the conversation turned toward our fathers.  I was quiet for a long time.  As a fatherless adult I didn’t know how to engage the topic.  Then a question came to mind that I had always wanted an answer to, so I asked, “When did you know you that you were a man?”

One by one my friends shared stories of how they grew into manhood.  I was in my early twenties and, as I listened to them share, an essential fact of my life was confirmed:  I was a man.

The difference between my friends and I is that they knew this fact and I didn’t.

That’s why I am grateful for Jim McBride’s new book, Rite of Passage:  A Father’s Blessing.

McBride believes that, “Adulthood shouldn’t be an accident.” and “In an era of aging pre-adults and wandering “adult-olecents,” it is essential that we as parents guide our children toward knowing when they have crossed from childhood to adulthood.  It is imperative that a father “call out the man or woman in his growing children?”

As the father of six children, I couldn’t agree more!

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