Review: It’s Time to Grow by Freddie Floyd Jr.

A provocative collection of sacred riffs and existential essays, It’s Time to Grow: How Focusing on Spiritual Growth Can Transform Your Life and Relationships by Freddie Floyd Jr. is a fount of healing wisdom that doesn’t hold back. Combining a healthy dose of tough love with impassioned reasoning and sound interpretations of Scripture, this is an unfiltered guidebook for spiritual and personal growth.

Building on humanity’s established need for more maturity, kindness, and self-awareness, both as believers and citizens of the world, the author presents a wide-ranging collection of essays about areas of life where improvements can be made. He argues for humility and honesty in the face of failure, setting realistic goals, resilience, commitment, forgiveness, generosity, and more, delving into the spiritual roots of these issues, as well as their daily applications.

Many of the topics covered are universally relevant regardless of faith, so for believers and skeptical readers alike, this compact read is a down-to-earth invitation to expand your relationship with the divine – or even start one – while helping you move through the contemporary world with more grace and success, covering topics from the need for mature communication and the importance of taking risks to remaining present in your life, practicing self-control, and embracing godliness.

At times, the book reads as an unflinching manifesto on modern men, at others, like an anecdotal sermon from an ambitious pastor. The casual breakdown of more abstract concepts and biblical lessons is refreshing, even clarifying certain points of contention between history and modern interpretations. That said, there are passages in the prose where the author might convey too much certainty about a nebulous issue, posing questions and immediately presenting answers, often stating things as an unequivocal fact or the only logical explanation to a moment of spiritual turmoil or moral dilemma.

This confidence may come off as emboldening for some readers, but it doesn’t leave much room for debate, or fluidity of thought. The writing can also read as an unedited stream of consciousness, with an excess of asides and circuitous syntax that would be better heard from a pulpit than read on a page. Trimming some of these casual and colloquial sections would sharpen the message, and keep the writer’s authoritative voice more intact. The use of superlatives (e.g., “all people,” “any woman”) and broadly sweeping statements may also raise the eyebrow of critical readers, particularly in the boldly traditionalist declarations of Chapter 16.

However, this informal nature of the writing makes for a conversational and generally low-pressure experience, as though you’re listening to an old friend who instinctively slips into spreading the good word and connecting the conversation back to spirituality. The conservative nature of the author’s religious beliefs can’t be denied, so readers should know that going in, but the author’s philosophy and theology blend neatly on the page, along with a more hard-lined tact than you normally find in works of religious self-help that is effective in its bluntness and bravado.

Despite some problematic elements in the execution, this remains an approachable guide for spiritual reinvention, and a candid invitation to deeper self-knowledge.