The Man Who Never Stopped Fighting

Tracy Girkin lay in the hospital bed, praying to God that he would take him. There have been so many times in Tracy’s life where this man has neared the end, more times than he can count. There have been times when he has fought people, arrested them, and even had bullets flying at him. Then, in 2017, he was diagnosed with cancer.

Tracy moved to Eureka Springs, AR in January 1966 and stayed around there for several years. He said in an interview “I wanted something more fulfilling, exciting, bigger.” So he joined the army in 1988 and served active duty for 9 years. In 1997, he worked in Border Patrol service for almost 5 years. He was also a medic on the search and rescue team and for SWAT. In 2002, he went to work for the Federal Air Marshal Service. Tracy traveled the world and did, in his words, “counter-terrorism stuff.” In 2018, he retired.

The military taught Tracy to order his thoughts and be disciplined, starting with simple things like shining his boots or making his bed. The military was a really good choice for him and had a positive impact on his life. This opened the door for other careers and taught him to sacrifice things for other people.

Faith is a big part of Tracy’s life and has greatly impacted his life through hardships. Relying on God has given him an interesting aspect of the hard adversities he’s gone through. He doesn’t view hard times as big deals anymore and doesn’t think of his adversities as terribly traumatic because of his outlook. He has remembered that you’re not alone and that everyone’s life has hard stuff. Many hard moments that he has persevered through are struggles in marriage, battling cancer, and being an alcoholic. His faith pushed him through fear, anxiety, and things he couldn’t control.

He had to remind himself every day: Take it “one day at a time.”

His mindset is that “I only have to worry about today.” Despite having to remind himself every day he is an alcoholic, he doesn’t even miss the alcohol. His outlook is that you don’t have to always be successful, but you can’t ever quit and that if you give it everything you have then you're not losing. He believes that when things get hard you have to keep going. Failure is quitting! The verse in the Bible that helped him was Psalm 144:1 “Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.”

This is his “testament of strength you get from your daily battles.”

Another one of his favorite and helpful verses is John 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

He interprets this as “He loved us to sacrifice a piece of himself.”

It is the impact of his interpretation of these verses that has turned him into the person he is today. Today, Tracy likes to live out his faith, spends time with his family, hangs out on his mountain in his nice house with his wife, goes kayaking as much as possible, and currently works at The Great Passion Play in Eureka Springs AR.