Two for One: The Spirituality of Discomfort

Yesterday, while leaving my ESL gig, I was trekking home when only a few buildings down the street in Harlem and a man stood inside a doorway with a bar of a scaffold above him. He was doing chin ups and it was dark. I watched him and walked on, but as soon as I crossed his path, he stopped, dropped to the sidewalk and said to me, "Do you have the time?"

I looked at the screen of my phone. It was straight up 6:00 pm, and when I told him, he said, "Thank you," and I moved on.

Later that evening, I thought about him. And I considered how the numbers 6:00 resonated with me, so I went to Doreen Virtue's Angels Book of Numbers and flipped to 600. "Give your worries and stress to God," it read. I sat on the edge of my bed and smiled and said a silent "thank you."

Whether the man doing chin ups had any relevance to it, did not matter. I simply knew it was time to drop my fears and to land feet first on the ground, solid and on purpose.