My guess is that not many of us have neighbors who are Olympic athletes. In our first home in Wyoming, Ohio, a Cincinnati suburb, the family home of a former swimming gold medal winner was just down the street from us, but that is as close as we’ve ever come.

At our BBQ on July 3, we spoke with one of our neighbors, Paul Schulte, who is on, we discovered, the US Paralympics basketball team. Paul is a paraplegic who has competed for a number of years at the highest level of wheelchair basketball, primarily with the Dallas Mavericks affiliated team.

Paul (with his wife, the former Meghan Greenwald – no relation, we think) will be heading for Beijing the end of August. The paralympics begin the week after the regular olympics end.

I’m excited by this. In previous neighborhoods, we rarely got to know our neighbors well enough to know who was living down the street. We have been intentional in this hoping that we could bless others. So far, the blessing has come our way.

We plan to have Paul and his wife over for dinner sometime soon. Paul is one of the world’s elite athletes. He just can’t walk.

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