Ray

My wife Joyce and I first met Ray in 1979 when we began attending Covenant Presbyterian Church. Ray was an Elder and one of the leaders of what was at the time a small church in Issaquah. Ray was always a gregarious individual and was very good at greeting and making you feel welcome at the church. The church was going through a bit of a growth spurt and several other young couples joined the Church about the time we did. To many of us young men Ray represented that wiser older brother. He was an example of a follower of Jesus Christ, a father and a husband that we were all trying to model.

Some of my best memories of Ray were serving with him at the church. When we arrived, he was also the church Treasurer. He quickly convinced me that I was the man for the job to replace him. Ray was working at Boeing in the Computer Service Division and was a trainer on various IBM mainframe computer languages. At the time he was also one of the few people who had and knew how to operate a personal computer. About every quarter, he would come over to our house and we would put the church financials into the computer. The computer was the Kaypro Z80, ran the CPM operating system and used VisiCalc software for the calculations. Problem was it worked about half the time and you had to be a genius (we weren’t) to make the software work. Throughout all the gyrations we always had lots of laughs (our accounting skills were also very weak) and Ray always enjoyed my constant needling about his “computer skills.”

Ray will be remembered as a gracious and loving man. He had a wonderful sense of humor and always saw the good in people and had a desire to help those who needed it. He loved his family and was always loyal and kind to his friends. He wasn’t much about talking about himself but always wanted to know about how you and your family were doing.

I’ll miss my friend but I’m happy that he’s in Heaven now with his Lord and Savior and enjoying a good conversation and laugh with his friends and loved ones there.