“What do you want to do with the rest of your life?”

Ken and Carol Tracy had been married almost ten years when they had a life-changing conversation on New Year’s Day 1974 and asked each other this simple question. Their answers? Carol wanted to finish her undergraduate degree. After building a good career in purchasing, Ken wanted to go to seminary.

Within eighteen months, “We left our jobs, sold our home, packed everything we owned plus two kids and an old cat in a U-Haul truck and trailer.” They put the $36,000 from the sale of their home in a savings account and headed off together to seminary.

“Following a calling to serve our Lord, we trusted God with our lives from then on. The day we departed for our first call, we took the last $100 out of our savings account for food and gas. But through the Presbyterian Church, God has provided for us through all our years of ministry and mission.” For most of their ministry that call involved serving small, financially strapped churches in the West and Alaska. “It’s what we loved doing,” says Carol. “Although I followed a secular career, I always worked in our churches. I felt that we were called together to each of his calls.”

Their ministry in such small churches gave them few resources to face hardships, however. When shortly into serving a small community in Alaska Carol started having respiratory problems, they had to ask the Board of Pensions for help even to get a diagnosis. With a shared grant from the Board and their presbytery, they were able to go to a clinic in Seattle where Carol was diagnosed with an allergy to a black mold in the basement and walls of their manse. Unfortunately, by the time it was diagnosed, the allergy had reduced her lung function by 70 percent. Since that time, even though they moved to Idaho where the climate was healthier for her lungs, they have still depended on the Board for a number of shared grants for their evolving health problems.

“As a presbytery executive some years ago, I filled out shared grant applications for a pastor. I knew those grants went a long way to giving her life more comfort and dignity, but I never imagined how important they’d be to us. But literally every time we’ve needed help, the Board has been there for us,” Ken says, “in partnership with the rest of the church and with our calling. I can’t say how grateful and how proud I am of our Presbyterian Church. We’re all called to serve Jesus Christ, and even though we all do it in different ways, we always do it in partnership.”

Today Presbyterians around the country have the opportunity to keep that partnership vital. Your gift to the Christmas Joy Offering today will help the church explore its partnership with families and individuals throughout their lives. Half the Offering supports racial ethnic schools and colleges where students can discover their call and develop the skills to respond to it. The other half supports the assistance programs of the Board of Pensions, keeping faith with those who have responded to that call with their lives, confident that the church would help them if they ever needed it. May our gifts to the Christmas Joy Offering today be an overwhelming affirmation of our partnership in that faith.

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