In Memory of Ndome Essoka: February 1970 – July 2007

My sister’s best friend!

Some of us have many friends. We have friends from elementary, middle, and high school. We have friends from college, work, and motherhood – the circles go on and on. I am one who chooses to live life that way. I network. I connect. I care. I keep in touch. My circles of friendship are expansive. Like the slinky toy that fascinated me so much when I was 10, my circles connect but the ones at the end are so far from the beginning they have little or nothing in common.

And then some of us have few friends. My sister chose this path. She has no time and no inclination to entertain my endless circled slinky approach to friendship. Instead she’s narrow and deep. There are few friends, but those friends have been there through elementary, middle, and high school. Through college, work, weddings, and motherhood. Like the lighthouses we used to worship at the Vineyard, these friends are omnipresent and stoic – they’re her guideposts in deep oceans. These friends are so few and deep, that they are also lighthouses in my life, ever present through it all.

Today it rained in my life, and the storm was not my own. It was my sister’s, it was the family’s, it belonged to other hearts and minds. Yet when you loose a light so bright, a guidepost in your ocean, a foundation that you thought would be ever present, the storm affects us all. Our ships can veer off course, until we finally see that if concentrate on faith despite the fear of the darkness, then maybe, just maybe, we will guided by the lighthouses in heaven’s ocean.