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

Written by Sammy Rhodes

Narrated by Webb Wilder

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780718080419

Sammy Rhodes

Sammy Rhodes is a campus minister with Reformed University Fellowship at the University of South Carolina. Rhodes is frequently invited to speak at conferences and churches on topics including anxiety and depression, approval, the Internet, pop culture, humor, theology, and leadership. Rhodes also has a popular Internet presence, which has been highlighted in Huffington Post, Salon, Paste, and Christianity Today.

Reviews for This Is Awkward

[hjvanderklis_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In This is Awkward, pastor Sammy Rhodes breaks away from the comfort zone, and opens up to share his personal awkward moments. From lust and fat, being single and parenting, Rhodes emphasizes the uncertainties, the lack of self-control, self-consciousness we deal with. God loves awkward people, for there isn't any other kind. We're afraid of His grace. It makes us just like everybody else: sinners in need of forgiveness. We want to be special, to be liked online and offline. Why would you think that your worth is directly tied to your waist size? Our self-sufficiency makes grace seem more like a threat than a cure. You are more than your Myers-Briggs or Enneagram type.The author uses lots of examples from movies, music and literature to make his point. Whether it's wedding night sex, depression, your parents' divorce, longing not to be another youth groupie anymore, Sammy is both honest, funny, raw, and confronting as well. When you confuse love for admiration, have many moments in your life you don't want to share publicly, then This Is Awkward is highly recommended.