TruthAwkward: The Whole Story, As Best I Can Tell It (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798180526366)

What happens when every person you trusted fails you - and you're forced to go back to the beginning?

That's the question at the heart of Truth Awkward - a raw, unfiltered account of one man's lifelong collision with faith, politics, and the relentless pursuit of what's actually true.

C.T. Paulsen grew up a small-town Texas Christian. He became a political conservative, a Fox News devotee, a champion of causes and candidates he believed were on the right side of history. And one by one, they let him down. The pandemic. The media. The politicians. Even the second coming of the political hero he'd staked everything on. When the last human being he'd put his faith in finally failed him, something broke open - and something else came alive.

Truth Awkward is the story of what he found when he stopped running and went back to the source.

Drawing on three companion volumes of historical and theological research - on Biblical Judaism, modern Judaism, and Islam - Paulsen traces the entire arc of human existence from creation to the present day: the God of Abraham, the fall of man, the revolutionary upside-down kingdom of Jesus, the dark forces working against it, and what any of us are actually supposed to do about it. He doesn't pretend to have all the answers. He doesn't soft-pedal the hard parts. He doesn't spare himself.

What he offers instead is something rarer: a genuinely honest account of what it looks like to wrestle with God and the world at the same time - and come out the other side still standing, still believing, still in.

This is not a comfortable book. It challenges Dispensationalism, questions blind political loyalty, confronts the corruption of institutions, and takes seriously the reality of spiritual warfare in ways that most churches avoid. But it is also, at its core, a book about hope - about a kingdom that has already defeated death, about a God who never left, and about the strange, awkward, irreplaceable value of telling the truth.

For anyone who has ever felt that the story they were given doesn't quite match the world they're living in - and who suspects the real story might be better than they've been told.