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Our Leadership
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One of the things that we highly value is listening to one another's stories. In particular, we love to hear about how people are encountering Jesus in their day-to-day lives. This might be in big ways...but it also happens most often in smaller ways (sometimes in ways that are really easy to miss.)
On this page you will find a treasure trove of such stories! May your own walk with Jesus be deeply encouraged and nourished by what you read here.
If you are interested in sharing some of your story here, please email us to let us know!
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I Shifted
In high school, a “Jesus Freak” told me about Jesus. A few weeks later, I decided to accept Jesus as savior. But not 100%, not yet. Not fully yet. Then in Alaska on a Coast Guard ship, a cook told me again about Jesus. Then in Seattle, still in the Coast Guard, I saw the “I Found It” billboards and called the number. A man came to the base to talk to me once more about Jesus. This time it was different. This time I made Jesus my Lord and Savior. Shortly after, I met Karen,
Steve Pettijohn
7 days ago3 min read
A Memorable Summer Recalled
The summer of 2001 was memorable for many reasons for our family. Our oldest daughter graduated from high school. Both my folks and my wife’s folks celebrated their 50th wedding anniversaries. Those celebrations included family reunions in both Wenatchee (my hometown) and Seaside, Oregon (where my in-laws had honeymooned in 1951). It was the summer my brother and I traveled to Norway to visit the birthplace of our immigrant grandfather who left home with his four brothers t
Greg Asimakoupoulos
Sep 103 min read
Mom's Ashes
Mom passed into the arms of Jesus on February 10, 2022. On August 17, 2026, I knew what to do with her ashes. Since February 2022, her ashes have been sitting in a cardboard box, enclosed in a green velvet bag. They weigh five and a half pounds. I scattered my dad’s ashes on Tiger Mountain in 2020, on the Bus Trail, a wheel chair accessible trail that loops around to Tradition Lake and features an ancient abandoned school bus. Although I had permission to scatter the ashes
Jani James
Sep 33 min read
Celebrating A Remarkable Life
Canada, Mexico and the United States hosted this year’s FIFA World Cup. Those same three nations hosted a most remarkable life over the course of ninety-five years. She was my wife’s mother and she died last month. Norma Steven was born and raised in British Columbia. She served as a missionary with Wycliffe Bible Translators in Mexico City and spent the last six decades of her adult life in Southern California. Her life, like the soccer tournament that highlighted our summer
Greg Asimakoupoulos
Aug 273 min read
Assumptions
“Bob,” the voice on the phone says, “we have a problem…with a breaker in our electrical panel at church. It keeps tripping. It won’t hold.” Never a good scenario. My mind kicks into overdrive reviewing all the different possibilities and what may be the cause. “It's the breaker that feeds our server and computer cabinet. I think it might be a bad breaker,” Kent (the voice on the phone) clarifies. Okay, good. More information. At least now I have an idea of what it fe
Bob Witty
Aug 203 min read
All's Well
This pastoral search has been an absolute delight. Not one day have I known what I was doing. As our Leadership Team put together the Pastoral Search Team (PST), I found my arm volunteering to chair the team before my mind caught up. My heart was fertile ground for God’s move. I told the Lord, “We are not going anywhere that You are not leading, and we won’t move until you say.” Our time this winter and spring was spent praying, studying our Covenant missional markers (remem
Beth Soderlund
Aug 132 min read
It's a Wonderful Memory
I met Karolyn Grimes, best known for her portrayal of Zuzu, George Bailey’s youngest daughter in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” shortly after our family moved back to Washington State from the Midwest in 2005. As the new pastor of the Covenant church in our community, I invited Karolyn to share her faith journey with our congregation. She graciously agreed. In the course of that interview, I realized her life (unlike the title of her movie) has not been all that wonderful. Karolyn
Greg Asimakoupoulos
Jul 314 min read
Sagrada Familia
Our big to-do for the summer was getting our immediate family together for a vacation in July; daughters, husbands, grandkids. It ended up being a vacation in a little town about an hour north of Barcelona. We would stay in a 14 bedroom mansion with a large swimming pool, tennis court and a short walk to the beach. We began planning this a year in advance and, to our amazement, everyone said they would come. We didn’t pre-plan a lot of activities, but I did try to get guid
Bob Witty
Jul 303 min read
Twilight
I was awake at 5:30am, even though the cloud cover muted the eastern sun, usually so bright at that hour. I puttered around, making tea until Greta woke up. Kent and I were staying in a house on the beach on Whidbey Island. Our job for the week was Grandma and Grandpa Camp with our grandsons, no hard task with the beach at hand and two World Cup games to watch. As the first one up in the morning, my task was to make sure Greta could get outside right away when she woke up.
Jani James
Jul 243 min read
Celebrating God's Global Family
OK! I admit it! I am a proud American. I don’t just listen to the National Anthem when it is sung at sporting events, I sing along, I religiously fly the Stars and Stripes on every national holiday. In addition, my closet has an array of patriotic apparel for such occasions. What a blast it has been dressing up to cheer on our team in the World Cup and to celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday. Seeing others wearing their flag sweaters and USA jerseys prompted the realization
Greg Asimakoupoulos
Jul 153 min read
Coming Home Part Four
A rule of thumb with problems is that they come in threes. Returning home this year, my problems came in four groups of three. In the Lord’s mercy, they didn’t come all at once. There was the water heater, in-floor heat, the HVAC system, multiple waterfront issues. The last group came in the form of our boat lift cover and the frame that supports it. The boat lift cover is a heavy canvas laid over a light duty frame and attached to the frame with heavy duty cord. The fr
Bob Witty
Jul 103 min read
America the Colorful
The purple mountain majesties and snow-white Mt. Rainier remind me of what's grand to me and you. There's Red Rocks Park and Yellowstone. Mt. Rushmore's hills are black. And add to that our flag's red, white and blue. I recently came across this little rhyme that I penned in my journal a decade ago while pondering our nation’s birthday. At the time it dawned on me that America is not only beautiful. It is also colorful. To the aforementioned American communities of color, I c
Greg Asimakoupoulos
Jul 33 min read
The Father-like Love of God
I attended the Seattle Mariners’ home opener a few weeks ago. Although our team lost the first game of the season, it was a memorable night. The unveiling of the Divisional Championship banner was an awesome sight. The enthusiastic welcome for our team, that came to within eight outs of going to their first World Series, was electric. But it’s what took place just before the opening pitch that stands out in my mind. It touched my heart. It brought tears to my eyes. An eleven-
Greg Asimakoupoulos
Jun 193 min read
Coming Home 3
In earlier posts (Coming Home Parts One and Two), I told about coming home after wintering in Palm Springs to lots of little and large repair projects, including a leaky hot water tank, in-floor water heating that didn’t work, a heat pump that wouldn’t shut off, a damaged boat-lift cover, a sunken water trampoline and a myriad of smaller issues. In time, I addressed or repaired these, and was feeling good that the worst was behind me. Then one night, I awoke about 3:00 in th
Bob Witty
Jun 113 min read
Graduation Day
I spent Thursday morning at a graduation and Summer Send-Off at the Lake and Park School in Seattle. Neither of my grands graduated this year but the younger one played 2 piano pieces, sang in the choir and spoke twice. Was it worth it to hear 8 graduation speeches, so that I could hear all that? Of course! But actually, I enjoyed the graduation speeches very much. These graduates are finishing fifth grade and moving on to middle school. Here are some snippets from the spe
Jani James
Jun 52 min read
One Word Prayer
Thirty-five years ago I found myself in the basement of despair. I was battling clinical depression. If you’ve ever been on the frontlines of that dreaded internal conflict, you can identify. It took every resource I could muster to find the energy to get out of bed. I lacked focus. I lacked feeling. I lacked a reason to live. There I was - a husband, the father of three young girls and the pastor of a dynamic church. Looking back, I can identify factors that resulted in my e
Greg Asimakoupoulos
May 273 min read
Coming Home 2
After a few days home from Palm Springs (and fixing everything imaginable), we left for Cabo for a week. A week later, coming home, I expected everything to be as we left it. Wrong! The water heater continued to leak. The 5-gallon bucket was full to overflowing, there was standing water at the base of the water heater and on the garage floor, and the pilot light was out. Oh, my goodness. Here we go again. I thought this was behind us. I guess not. And so, I go into Bo
Bob Witty
May 213 min read
Meg
A couple weeks ago, I visited Laura Jones at her home in Bellevue. Laura is a fairly new addition to a Thursday morning Bible study group at Creekside. We walked Laura's pair of English Cream Retrievers, Hank and Hazel, around Lake Boren and then sat down for a cup of tea at her kitchen table. My intention was to record Laura’s story of God restoring her eyesight for the Creekside blog. Instead, I got to meet Laura’s son Luke and his wife, Meg. Luke made me a very delicio
Jani James
May 153 min read
The Hands of a Mother
Like you, I’m thinking about my mom this weekend. Although she passed away six years ago, deposits in my memory bank over the years continue to compound with interest. One of my final memories of my mother is watching her play the piano a couple weeks before she died. In spite of her dementia, she could still make those eighty-eight keys sing beautifully. As I listened to her play hymns she taught me as a boy, I looked at those familiar hands. Those gnarled age-spotted finger
Greg Asimakoupoulos
May 63 min read
Coming Home
Palm Springs is nice if you like hot, dry weather with periodic dust storms, and lots of golf. I love it there. But there is no place like home (cloudy, wet, cold). After three months, we came back to Seattle. But I came back with a sense of foreboding. I learned that the water trampoline sunk in a windstorm; the boat canopy was damaged in another storm and dangling precariously over the water; the front door wouldn’t unlock; the garage door wouldn’t open; the bulkhead w
Bob Witty
May 13 min read
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