On Sunday, Bilal Quintyne sat in a church he’d never been to before and heard the pastor praise him.

The 24-year-old amateur boxer is not a religious man, but he believes in God, and one day in early May he felt a call. Preparing for a training run in Smyrna, Ga., he noticed an older woman sitting in a wheelchair by the side of the road. The chair was stuck, and she could not move.

“She kind of had a blank look,” he recalled. “I just asked her, ‘Are you okay?’ ”

The woman, 67-year-old Belinda Whitaker, told him that she had been there for 45 minutes since her wheelchair motor conked out. She was within a few steps of a church and a carwash. But aside from a passerby who had helped her back into her chair after she was thrown to the ground by the initial jolt, no one had offered assistance.

So she asked Quintyne: Would he call someone to help?

“I’ll do you one better,” he said. “God blessed me with an able body. I’ll push you home.”

Whitaker was skeptical. She says she thought, “Yeah, sure, he says that, but after he gets going he’s going to say, ‘This is too much for me.’ ”

Whitaker, a semiretired real estate agent who had polio as a child, had set out from her senior housing complex that day to do some shopping. Her electric wheelchair had recently gotten a new battery, and after it stopped, she jiggled some wires to try to find a connection, but it wouldn’t move...READ MORE