This Is Awkward: How Life's Uncomfortable Moments Open the Door to Intimacy and Connection

by Sammy Rhodes Narrated by Webb Wilder

Overview

Don't waste your awkwardness.

The most difficult subjects in our lives are also the ones that we find most uncomfortable to talk about: divorce, body image, sexuality, pornography, or depression. Our awkward silence reveals the gap that exists between what we are and what we know we should be. But God loves those awkward moments, Sammy Rhodes argues, because they are precisely where we find connection with God and one another.

In This Is Awkward, Rhodes talks directly, honestly, hilariously about the most painfully uncomfortable subjects in our lives. In chapters like “Parents Are a Gift (You Can't Return Them)” and “The Porn in My Side,” he boldly goes where most of us fear to tread, revealing that we can be liberated by the embrace of a God who knows the most shameful things about us and loves us all the same. Because nothing is too awkward for God.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

12/14/2015
Awkward moments are cheerfully repurposed in this wry book of observations and advice from Rhodes, campus minister with Reformed University Fellowship at the University of South Carolina. A mix of anxiety, depression, pop culture, humor, and theology infuses this delightful text. Rhodes shares many of his own personal anecdotes in cringeworthy and often sidesplitting fashion, relating parenting mishaps, his no-divorce policy, the “porn in my side,” and a no “side-hugging Jesus” lifestyle. In each acerbic chapter, Rhodes digs deep into life’s trials and troubles and helps point the way out of the rubble of heartache. His work aims to take the pressure off of the awkward experiences (and the emotional responses they invoke) that seem to be everywhere. Readers will get more than they bargained for in this feel-good book that’s written for times when life doesn’t feel good at all. (Mar.)

Library Journal

05/01/2016
In this debut, Rhodes (campus minister, Reformed Univ. Fellowship, Univ. of South Carolina) offers a pop culture-inspired rumination on his milieu. After the author crafted a name for himself as a hipster campus minister on Twitter, comedian Patton Oswald publicly accused Rhodes of plagiarism. This uncomfortable interaction became the launching point for this memoir, a self-referential apologia in which the memory of many awkward moments serves as "an invitation to vulnerability, and vulnerability is where intimacy and connection [to God] are found." Fans of Rhodes will enjoy his clever witticisms and pithy self-deprecation. He regularly references the TV series Friday Night Lights and Taylor Swift as spiritual touchstones for some of his paradoxical insights such as admitting his fear of people yet still seeking their approval and embracing the Internet for a sense of identity. VERDICT Those new to the author might find the humor falls a little flat and the narrative gaze is limited. Despite these issues, this breezy book provides insights into the reality of living imperfectly.—SC

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171076719
Publisher:	Nelson, Thomas, Inc.
Publication date:	03/01/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos