In advance of turning forty this past summer, I decided that I wanted to greet the milestone by getting into shape in a way that I never had before.

Having let my gym membership expire for financial and practical reasons, I decided that not only would I reinstate it, but also throw in a short-term package of workouts with a physical trainer.

Perhaps it was a certain homeopathic instinct in me that wanted to treat the symptom with a dosage of what causes it, but with the weight of the world pressing down on me (for legitimate and illegitimate reasons alike), I felt an intense urge to hit the weights.

Not as I had done in times past—that is, in a fairly uninformed, DIY manner—but in the hands of a trainer for maximum benefit in a contained period of time.

During my initial exchange of e-mails with Bob Wells before we met I was struck by the unusual nature of his correspondence which always began by asking, “Brad, how are you?” No matter how incidental the back-and-forth exchange pertaining to a schedule, he would not forfeit a certain friendly formality in the interest of expediency.

I noticed the e-mail address indicated his being an alumnus of Duke. “He’s probably a southern gentleman,” my wife wagered when I relayed my curiosity. Right. A proper southern gentleman in New York City who went by Bob for Robert.

So when I showed up for our first session and saw that Bob Wells was a black man, I had to laugh on the inside for my errant cultural radar. But little did I know that in the coming weeks he would proceed to dismantle my radar piece by piece, stereotype by stereotype.

Bob was every bit the gentlemen in person as he was in e-mail, and the southern part held in my mind until there was a chance to prove otherwise during the preliminary intake. Gentleman, yes; southern, probably; just not the southern gentleman that I had imagined.

Atlanta, I thought to myself, as he logged in my physical statistics and goals. I kind of had a feeling he might be from Atlanta.

“Manhattan Beach,” was his answer when I asked.

This time I had to be careful not to audibly laugh. Manhattan Beach? Okay, now I could trade my guesswork for firsthand experience. I’ve been to Manhattan Beach a lot, having family who used to live there and business in Los Angeles. It is a community whiter than the sunscreen that defines it, one in which most days, it seems, you could count on one thumb the number of black people you might see.

Within minutes, I had taken a bright shine to Bob Wells, as much for the foil that he played to my mistaken preconceptions as for his demeanor and expertise. And if there’s an unfortunate racial pun in the “shine” component of that idiom, within weeks he’d be the first to expose it with a laugh.

But first, my own laughter would only grow audible and more so with each new personal detail that he rolled out for me.

When I joked one day during a particularly hard workout that I might not be able to pick up my baby son that night, he told me about the time he suffered such a workout himself and later struggled to lift the Torah scroll at synagogue for the congregation to see.

“Wait, back up—did you say, Torah scroll? And synagogue?”

Yep, he’s Jewish alright. Born to a mother of Ethiopian descent, Bob works around the clock six days a week but strictly keeps the Sabbath on the seventh.

Another time, when discussing the 2012 presidential candidates between my sets of sit-ups, he made mention of a certain policy problem for “fellow Republicans” in his base.

That one, at that point, I thought I had misheard. But the following week I had to ask.

Yep, he’s Republican alright.

Bob Wells, a black Republican Jew from Manhattan Beach.

Who has a softer spot for show tunes and Broadway musicals than many of his gay, liberal clients at Equinox gym in the West Village of New York.

“Stop,” I said to him one day. But it didn’t stop there.

Often I find him reading when I arrive at the gym, be it Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, or an essay by Darwin on nineteenth-century population trends. And though my initial sense of surprise said as much about me in the negative (a bookish physical trainer?) as it does about him in the positive (he credits his mom, who was a librarian), the pleasure of having my stereotypes broken far outweighs the guilt for having had them in the first place.

Meanwhile, he’s training to compete in a natural bodybuilding contest, just to complete the picture.

A few years ago, I posted a blog here titled “Ode to a Bunker-Busting Muslim,” about a fellow writer (Kamran Pasha) on a TV show (“Kings”) who more consciously defied the culturally induced stereotypes that preceded him.

Bob Wells has now rounded out the Abrahamic equation in play, so I guess I can only hope that in some ways I, too, make for a happy rebuttal of certain stereotypes that they or others may bring to the table when it’s revealed that I’m a Christian.

God knows the C-word has its own fair share of stereotyping to deal with in our culture today. (Which is one more reason to be thankful for Image, and honored to be a part of it.)

But most of all, there is thanks to be given for a God whose wildly surprising creativity in his children never ceases to transcend the categorical small-mindedness with which we so often perceive, and preconceive, one another.

“Would you mind if I took a photo of you to post with the blog?” I asked Bob last week.

“Sure,” he replied. “I’ll wear my watermelon yarmulke.”

And sure enough, he did.