“You just need to fall in love with something”

As Covenant Partners Jim and Peen Hardy served with international missions and local afterschool programs, they grew in the conviction that they wanted to dedicate a portion of their estate to helping those who are under-resourced. Five years ago, they chose to become Legacy Society members with the Heart of the City Foundation, ensuring their wealth will meaningfully bless others for generations to come.

“There’s a painting of a sailor at a steering wheel of a boat with Jesus’s hands also on the wheel, and that’s what came to mind when I performed that surgery,” says Jim Hardy, a retired physician who at the time was serving with a medical mission with his wife, Peen, in the country now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). He’d been asked to do a procedure he’d never done before, and with stress-fringed nerves, he resolved, “Lord, I can’t do this, but You can.”

You never know what’s going to change you, but when God opens a door, it helps to walk through it. Time after time, through 60 years of marriage, Covenant Partners Jim and Peen Hardy have felt blessed to have the chance to do just that, not only enriching their faith but also endearing their hearts to those who have not had the same opportunities they have had in life. 

Back in 1985, a representative from the Medical Benevolence Foundation, a Presbyterian medical mission board, came to speak at their church in Leesburg. As he shared about a one-month medical volunteer opportunity in the DRC, Jim and Peen listened intently. Jim said, “Why not me?” 

“I went [to the Democratic Republic of the Congo] and I found things to do to get involved and it changed my life.”

As a former educator without a medical background, Peen asked the representative, “Should I go? What would I do when I’m there?” She laughs, “The answer was, ‘Well, the wives are never bored,’ which wasn’t a very good answer, but I went and I found things to do to get involved and it changed my life.”

Leaving their two children with grandparents—one child in the midst of football season, the other having just gotten her driver’s license—Jim and Peen left for the DRC. There, they witnessed the pain and suffering of an impoverished people who had been in the grip of constant war with Rwanda, outbreaks of the ebola virus, and the international plundering of their copper and cobalt. They also experienced the miracle of people showing up for each other and the fruit of taking good risks. 

They left the DRC two days after Jim had performed that surgery he’d never performed before, but a few months later, he got a phone call that it had gone great. Jim says, “That changed my faith.”

After the incredible experience Jim and Peen had serving in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—“It was just a tremendously eye-opening and gratifying time for us”—they fell in love with missions, leaping at the chance to serve again and again when God presented it to them. Here, Jim tends to a boy in Jamaica.

After that trip, Peen became a 30-year member of the board of The Outreach Foundation (TOF), a national Presbyterian mission board. Dr. Howard Chadwick, the senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Orlando (FPCO) at the time, was one of the founders of this board. Through TOF, Peen became involved in orphanages in Zambia and Zimbabwe and with missions in India and elsewhere. 

Together, she and Jim have served with missions in the aforementioned countries, Costa Rica, and Jamaica. This “fire for missions” seems to run in the family, too, with their daughter becoming Director of Foreign Missions for the First Methodist Church in Winter Park for many years and their nephew starting Grace Medical Home. 

While international missions have held dear places in their hearts, their desire and willingness to care for under-resourced people has extended just as meaningfully into the communities where they have lived. Both at their church in Leesburg and at FPCO, they have engaged themselves in afterschool programs, making themselves present to students as they navigate life without the resources others may have. 

“Having known these students and their struggles, what it takes for them to go to college and to get an education,” Peen emotionally shares, “we just love being a part of that when we can.”

Jim and Peen received an intimate understanding of what these students face when they invited one of the young women from FPCO’s recently retired afterschool program, 412, to live with them for a year while she was in college. She graduated, and Jim and Peen emerged from their time together with an even greater awareness of the challenges students face when they don’t have the same resources as others. 

After all of these adventures and through countless transformational relationships, Jim and Peen wanted to establish a lasting way for their resources to uplift these people they hold in their hearts.

After all of these adventures and through countless transformational relationships, Jim and Peen wanted to establish a lasting way for their resources to uplift these people they hold in their hearts. When they first became Covenant Partners 15 years ago, Peen served on the missions committee where she became familiar with the church’s endowment, the Heart of the City Foundation, through the Foundation’s work with 412. 

Now as Legacy Society members, they have chosen to express their generosity by entrusting a portion of their estate to the Heart of the City Foundation, through which they will carry on this spirit of care for the under-resourced abroad and at home for generations to come. They have dedicated this gift to international missions and to a scholarship fund—to bless those who deserve more but who have had less. 

“You need to fall in love with something that needs help,” says Jim. “There are numerous opportunities. You just need to fall in love with something.”