Book review: "This is Awkward" by Sammy Rhodes

"Don't waste your awkwardness. It may be the very place you learn to be vulnerable and thus experience the grace of God".

I didn't do this on purpose, but I kind of like that I'm reviewing a book about awkwardness on a day that shows up on our calendar only occasionally. It's kind of an awkward day on the calendar so it fits with our theme nicely.

In the book, the author covers a variety of topics that a lot of people struggle with but might have trouble talking with: depression, divorce (especially when it's your parents), sexual abuse, etc. But he also talks about great things too like friendship, love, forgiveness and grace.

The parts of the book that I liked the best were the ones that talked about friendship. Friendship is a life changing, life giving thing. And not just the skin deep kind of friendships, but the friendships where you can be your whole self around them an no that they still love you. Or they know your secrets and they still love and accept you even if you have a hard time accepting and loving yourself. He quotes a friend who says "The two most life-giving words in the English language are me too". I can't agree enough with this. (It also made me think of this quote by CS Lewis: "Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought I was the only one.")

My favorite quote: "Sometimes life is like Hebrew: it's best understood backwards"


I think that a lot of the fears and experiences described in this book are shared by a lot of people. "Am I going to be the reason that my kids will be in therapy someday?" (Probably, yes). "Is the fact that I struggle with porn make me the biggest sinner ever? No one seems to talk about those kinds of pproblems so it must make me the worst, right?" (No, you're not the worst.)

One thing that I was curious about was what actually lead our author into the ministry. Because, if I had the kind of nervousness and social awkwardness that he has you'd think that preaching in front of hundreds of people and having one on one talks with people about sensitive and painful topics would be something you'd run away screaming from. Maybe that's in the next book.....

What I truly appreciate about this book is that really nothing is held back. There wasn't any feeling of "Man, if I include this in the book people are going to think that I'm nuts! I should leave that out." I feel like he really laid his feelings bare and that is a brave thing to do!

This book comes out tomorrow, March 1st at a local indie bookstore or a huge corporate bookstore near you!

I signed up to be on the launch team of this book, I got this book for free in exchange for an honest review.