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My Testimony
The Restoration of Man is a Christian discipleship book that helps men confront emotional wounds, develop healthier habits, and rediscover their identity in God through biblical teaching, prayer, and practical exercises. Why was this an important book for you to write?
The Restoration of Man was important for me to write because it came out of my own breaking, healing, and rebuilding with God. For most of my life, I carried emotional wounds I didn’t know how to name, let alone confront. Those wounds shaped my identity, my relationships, and the way I showed up as a man. When God met me at fifty, He didn’t just save me—He began restoring parts of me I didn’t even realize were lost.
As I walked through that process, I realized how many men are living the same silent battles: father wounds, shame, unhealthy habits, spiritual confusion, and a deep sense of not knowing who they are. I wrote this book because men need a path that is honest, biblical, and practical. They need discipleship that speaks to the heart, not just the behavior. They need tools, prayer, and truth that help them rebuild their identity in God piece by piece.
This book is my testimony, but it’s also a guide. It’s the roadmap I wish I had years ago. And if it helps even one man step out of performance, confront his pain, and rediscover who he is in Christ, then the journey of writing it was worth every moment.
The book encourages readers to listen carefully and put down their phones. Why are these seemingly small actions so important to spiritual and emotional growth?
Men often look for dramatic spiritual breakthroughs, but transformation usually begins with tiny, consistent choices. Putting the phone down for ten minutes. Sitting with Scripture. Paying attention to what’s happening inside. These small acts create space for God to do the deeper work.
The phone isn’t the enemy — but distraction is.
And distraction is one of the greatest threats to emotional and spiritual maturity.
You include journal questions, weekly assignments, and prayers throughout the book. What led you to choose this practical, participatory format?
I chose to include journal questions, weekly assignments, and prayers because restoration doesn’t happen just by reading about it — it happens when a man engages with God, his story, and his habits in a real, personal way. Men often carry wounds that sit beneath the surface, and those wounds don’t move just because we understand them intellectually. They move when we slow down, reflect, name what’s happening inside, and invite God into the process.
The journal questions help men confront what they usually avoid.
The weekly assignments give them small, doable steps that build new patterns.
The prayers guide them into conversations with God many men have never had.
I wrote the book this way because discipleship is participatory. Jesus didn’t just teach; He invited people to walk, practice, respond, and follow. I wanted this book to mirror that — not just information, but formation. Not just concepts, but change. The exercises create space for God to work, and they help men experience restoration instead of just reading about it.
Who do you most hope will read The Restoration of Man, and how might pastors, mentors, or men’s groups use it to encourage meaningful conversations?
I wrote The Restoration of Man for men who feel stuck, wounded, or spiritually disconnected — especially those who have spent years carrying pain they’ve never talked about. It’s for the man who looks strong on the outside but feels lost on the inside. It’s for the man who knows God is calling him deeper but doesn’t know how to get there. And it’s for the man who wants to grow but needs guidance, structure, and a safe place to start.
I also hope younger men read it so they don’t have to wait until mid‑life to confront the things that quietly shape their identity. And I hope older men read it because it’s never too late for God to rebuild a life.
The True Gift of Christmas
Clancy is a heartwarming children’s Christmas story about an anxious camel who learns to face his insecurities, embrace his uniqueness, and discover the courage to take part in something special. What draws you to write children’s literature?
When I was young, my grandmother often read Dr. Seuss’ books aloud, and I found myself mesmerized by the melody of the words and the way they bounced off the page. I knew that if I ever wrote a children’s book, I would write in poetic meter and use words that were a little bit of a challenge for the intended age range. This approach naturally invites conversation between the reader and the child, just like Dr. Seuss’ books did for my grandmother and me. When I began writing Clancy, that famous anapestic tetrameter started to flow through me. (One of my favorite examples of this style is Dr. Seuss’ I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew). Advancing a story in twenty-four-syllable stanzas while sustaining the rhyme scheme brings me irrational levels of joy. If I hit a roadblock, I maneuver the words and count out the beats like solving some sort of musical jigsaw puzzle. Clancy and the cast of Cameltown’s characters wouldn’t be the same any other way.
Clancy worries about his crooked hump, awkward knees, unruly hair, and troublesome tooth. Why did you choose these specific insecurities to shape his character?
I wanted Clancy to struggle with characteristics that were common to all camels. If you look at a group of camels, you’ll notice they all have imperfect humps, knobby knees, wild tufts of hair on their heads, and not a single one of them has straight teeth. Yet Clancy was convinced that he was alone in his imperfections. In reality, we’re all a little bit like Clancy. None of us is perfect, but we tend to put our own flaws under the magnifying glass. Sadly, children begin to internalize their insecurities as early as age five. When focusing on their own perceived shortcomings, children tend to develop feelings of unworthiness, which can cause them to pull away and create a deeply ingrained negative self-image.
This is why the role of a trusted adult confidant is so important in a child’s life. This caring adult doesn’t “fix” the problem; they guide the child through it. In Clancy’s case, this adult confidant was Mayor Camello. The mayor gave Clancy his undivided attention, shared his vulnerability by disclosing his own past struggles, and encouraged Clancy to pray.
Christian faith plays a central role in the book. How did your own beliefs influence the story’s messages about worry, trust, and belonging?
As a Christian, when I feel overwhelmed, I’m reminded to cast my anxieties on God, because He cares for us (1 Peter 5:7).
Clancy was so fixated on his own insecurities that anxiety took hold of him. He forgot that God’s power is made perfect in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9) and if we draw near to God, He will draw near to us (James 4:8). God loves us so dearly that He delights in using us, flaws and all, for things greater than we could ever imagine (1 Corinthians 2:9).
If readers take away one lasting message from Clancy’s Christmas journey, what would you most want it to be?
Christmas has become such a commercialized holiday that we often lose sight of why we’re even celebrating. The same reminder Clancy receives is the very one we all need: the true Gift of Christmas is Jesus. He was born, died, and, as evidenced by the hundreds of documented witnesses (1 Corinthians 15:6), was resurrected to life as an eternal sacrifice for our sins. All He asks is that we believe.
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Written in playful, bouncing rhymes, Clancy is a timelessly whimsical, read-aloud storybook. Through the heart of a timid camel, we discover that when we cast our burdens on the Lord, He helps us to overcome our fears and insecurities with confidence. With vibrant characters wrapped up in an engaging gospel message, Clancy captivates children ages 1-100.
The Restoration of Man-A Journey to Healing, Identity, and God-Anchored Masculinity
The Restoration of Man is a Christian discipleship book that asks men to examine the emotional wounds, habits, and expectations shaping their lives. It brings together personal reflections, biblical teaching, prayer, and practical exercises, with a particular interest in the gap between looking dependable and feeling connected to your own life. The author writes from a conviction that healing begins with honesty before God and grows through a relationship with Jesus. That belief gives the book its direction and its warmth. Its central invitation is to receive an identity rooted in being loved by God, then let that understanding influence how you work, relate to others, and handle responsibility.
What I appreciated most is the attention it gives to everyday expressions of growth. Listening carefully, putting down your phone, asking for help, and answering a simple question honestly all receive serious consideration. Those details give the spiritual themes a practical footing. The book also treats vulnerability as something men can practice in trusted relationships, which adds a welcome sense of companionship to its emphasis on personal reflection. Its recurring chapter structure includes journal questions, weekly assignments, and prayers that encourage readers to pause and participate. You’re asked to notice your own responses, make specific choices, and return to the work over time. That structure makes the book especially useful for someone who enjoys reading with a notebook nearby and wants a clear way to put the material into practice.
The writing has the rhythm of a pastor speaking directly to a congregation: short sentences, repeated phrases, and firm encouragement. That style gives many passages energy and makes the author’s concern for his readers easy to feel. His personal reflections help the teaching feel grounded in someone’s real experience. Across the full book, though, the repetition becomes noticeable, especially as closely related ideas about presence, calling, and legacy receive similar treatment. Some chapters would carry more weight with tighter wording and more distinct examples. The broad statements about men’s inner lives also leave limited room for differences in temperament and experience. Even so, the steady emphasis on patient growth and daily choices gives the book an encouraging tone that suits its devotional purpose.
I’d recommend The Restoration of Man to Christian men who are carrying plenty of responsibility while feeling emotionally tired, distant, or unsure how to speak about what’s happening inside them. Husbands, fathers, and men involved in church leadership may find its attention to presence and influence especially relevant, while younger men could appreciate its invitation to build habits of honesty early. Pastors, mentors, and men’s small groups would also have plenty to discuss, particularly if they allow time for the exercises and thoughtful conversation. The book rewards a slow pace and a willingness to engage personally with its explicitly Christian outlook. Its most appealing quality is the care it brings to the question of how a man can become more attentive, open, and faithful in the life he already has.
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Nonfiction
The Literary Titan Book Award recognizes outstanding nonfiction books that demonstrate exceptional quality in writing, research, and presentation. This award is dedicated to authors who excel in creating informative, enlightening, and engaging works that offer valuable insights. Recipients of this award are commended for their ability to transform complex topics into accessible and compelling narratives that captivate readers and enhance our understanding.
Award Recipients
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
Witnesses: Nine Stories From The Margins Of The Gospels
Witnesses by Mike Casper is a Gospel-inspired short story collection that places ordinary people at the edges of familiar biblical events. This Christian historical fiction moves through nine distinct perspectives, including a mischievous child at Jesus’s baptism, a tilapia enlisted to retrieve the temple-tax coin, a corrupt tax collector, Joseph of Nazareth, the Samaritan woman, the Gerasene demoniac, and an aging Pontius Pilate. Casper’s central idea is compelling: history’s sacred moments were also confusing, physical, noisy events experienced by people who understood only part of what they saw.
The variety of narrators gives this biblical fiction much of its personality. “Whatever That Means” captures a child’s irreverent curiosity, while “The Angel and the Fish” turns obedience into playful aquatic comedy. The longer “The Tax Collector’s Gala” offers the collection’s richest social world, filled with guilty luxury, compromised friendships, and grace quietly working through Debra’s prayers and generosity. “Legion” is appropriately claustrophobic, its fractured voice conveying a man overwhelmed by commands that have nearly erased his identity. The closing story, “Death Comes Pretty,” then gives the book its most searching moral question as Pilate considers responsibility, choice, and the crucifixion he authorized.
Casper’s Christian short stories are grounded in work, bodies, and sensory detail. Builders assess roofs, bakers calculate provisions, a dying carpenter imagines heaven through flawless joinery, and holiness arrives amid sweat, blood, dust, animal smells, and shared food. That physical attention keeps the collection conversational even when its theology is direct. The emotional resolutions tend to arrive clearly, often through healing, forgiveness, or a decision to follow Jesus, giving the book an earnest devotional character. Its most affecting scenes are quieter ones, such as Silki holding Cyrus’s face, Simon’s wife repeating his forgotten name, and Joseph recognizing the traveler beside him.
As a work of biblical historical fiction, Witnesses offers an accessible, compassionate look at faith from the margins of the Gospels. Its humor, sorrow, miracles, and moral reckonings are tied together by the question of what people do after encountering something larger than their understanding. Two discussion guides, suggested readings, and biblical references make it especially well suited to Christian book clubs, church groups, and readers who enjoy faith-based fiction with plenty to discuss. The collection’s lasting impression comes from its witnesses themselves: flawed, practical people who meet the sacred in the middle of the lives they’re already living.
Pages: 132 | ASIN: B0GX9Y2JL1
Literary Titan Gold Book Award: Nonfiction
The Literary Titan Book Award recognizes outstanding nonfiction books that demonstrate exceptional quality in writing, research, and presentation. This award is dedicated to authors who excel in creating informative, enlightening, and engaging works that offer valuable insights. Recipients of this award are commended for their ability to transform complex topics into accessible and compelling narratives that captivate readers and enhance our understanding.
Award Recipients
The Bear and Cat Chronicles by Kris Neely
Visit the Literary Titan Book Awards page to see award information.
The Invisible Soul Anthology: Healing With Words
The Invisible Soul Anthology, by George Beasley, is a deeply personal and inspirational Christian memoir built from nearly fifty stories, reflections, memories, and poems about trauma, faith, family, grief, mental health, and healing. Beasley describes the collection as a journey from hidden struggles toward emotional healing and redemption, and that idea gives the book its shape. Readers are led through memories as they surface, taking them from childhood abuse and group homes to marriage, fatherhood, ministry, therapy, loss, and the quieter moments that have helped him make sense of it all. As a faith-based memoir, the book feels personal in the way a long conversation with someone can be personal. Beasley isn’t standing at a distance from these experiences. He’s writing from inside them.
One of the most compelling parts of this trauma recovery memoir is the way ordinary places and objects become containers for much larger emotions. A sandbar becomes a place of belonging, a river becomes an image of grief and the undertow of despair, a childhood closet holds both terror and an imagined fire of hope, and a catfish pond becomes a mental refuge first learned in a group home and rediscovered decades later through therapy. These recurring images give the book its own language. Beasley also writes openly about suicidal thoughts, childhood trauma, triggers, therapy, and the difficult work of recognizing emotions he spent much of his life avoiding. That makes The Invisible Soul Anthology as much a mental health memoir as it is a Christian testimony. Faith and professional help aren’t treated as competing ideas here. They become parts of the same healing journey.
The heart of the collection, though, is connection. Beasley returns again and again to the people who helped him survive and grow: his wife Lisa, his daughters and grandchildren, his brothers, old friends, therapists, house parents, ministry partners, and even people encountered briefly along the way. Some of the strongest pieces look at relationships from the distance of many years and allow an old memory to take on a different meaning. In “Was It Love or Was It…,” for example, what he carried as childhood betrayal gradually becomes an understanding of his mother’s desperate attempt to protect him. That willingness to revisit the past is central to this Christian healing book. The prose is direct, emotionally exposed, and often devotional, with scripture and faith woven naturally into the author’s interpretation of what happened and why those experiences still matter.
What stayed with me most is the book’s conviction that words can become part of the healing process. Beasley repeatedly shows writing as a way of bringing buried memories into the light, giving language to pain, and leaving something useful for the people who come afterward. Late in the collection, he writes about opening himself to emotions while spending time with his grandchildren and discovering that something as simple as giving them his time can become an expression of love and a repair of what was missing in his own childhood. That captures The Invisible Soul Anthology well. It’s a Christian memoir about healing, but it’s also an anthology about being seen, listening closely, loving people while there’s still time, and finding meaning in memories that once seemed too painful to revisit. Readers drawn to inspirational Christian books, spiritual memoirs, and trauma recovery stories will find plenty here to sit with long after the final page.
Pages: 275 | ASIN : B0HD3W8G2V
Can Anything Good Come Out of Jim Crow?
Jacqueline Smith’s Can Anything Good Come Out of Jim Crow? is a faith-centered memoir built from family stories, historical reflection, practical wisdom, and photographs. Smith traces her upbringing in segregated Port Arthur, Texas, where her parents ran several small businesses and raised her within a demanding culture of work, discipline, service, and Christian belief. Rather than treating Jim Crow only as a historical backdrop, she shows how it shaped the family’s ambitions, fears, responsibilities, and ideas about survival. Her central question receives a deeply personal answer: goodness appears in what people build, preserve, teach, and pass along despite oppressive circumstances.
The strongest presence in the book is Smith’s family. Her father, Jack, is a tireless entrepreneur and forceful storyteller whose repeated instructions teach her to prepare early, work harder, and never surrender her sense of possibility. Her mother, affectionately called Muh, embodies patient, sacrificial care, especially in tending to Smith’s two profoundly disabled siblings when support services were largely inaccessible to Black families. Their household feels vivid and lived-in, filled with customers, taxi calls, music, business lessons, church teachings, and constant activity. Smith’s affection for her parents gives the memoir warmth, while her willingness to describe disappointment, anger, pressure, and family sacrifice keeps that affection grounded.
Smith writes much as she seems to speak: directly, energetically, and with a teacher’s instinct for drawing a lesson from every experience. Biblical passages frame the chapters, and personal episodes often develop into reflections on marriage, patience, responsibility, loneliness, education, perseverance, and trusting God’s timing. Faith isn’t a decorative theme here. It’s the lens through which Smith interprets childhood segregation, a devastating surgical injury to her vocal cords, professional changes, her long wait for marriage, motherhood, and the life she eventually built with her husband and children. The final photographic chapter brings the argument into focus by presenting later generations, college graduates, an expanding family, and interracial friendships as visible continuations of a life that began under Jim Crow.
This book will resonate most with Christian readers who enjoy testimony-driven memoirs, as well as families interested in preserving stories across generations. It should also appeal to readers who want an intimate account of Black family life during segregation, particularly one centered on entrepreneurship, caregiving, education, and spiritual inheritance. Smith’s frequent repetition gives the book the feeling of sitting with an elder who wants to make absolutely certain the lesson stays with you. That conversational persistence is part of its character. The result is a sincere family record and devotional memoir that invites readers to examine not only what they’ve endured, but what their lives may allow them to give the next generation.
Pages: 132 | ASIN : B0H72LCQ52
