In late June, one location alert came through our priest’s social media posts. The other, through a text for a sporadic group chat among three of us, all Episcopalians, who were Lynks Society sisters at Wake Forest.

I realized both the Rev. Ryan Whitley (’03) and Jennifer Wade Greiner (’89) were in Louisville, Kentucky, for The General Convention of The Episcopal Church. I wanted them to formally meet. Too many coincidences not to. And my late husband, Mark O. Howerton, would think it an imperative.

Mark died Oct. 4, after a valiant, five-year fight against kidney cancer. He was a die-hard University of Oregon Fighting Duck. But he was also a big fan of Wake Forest for the role it had played in shaping me and for the rich, intimate community of friends he inherited. We were five or six years into our relationship and newly married when he casually remarked one day, “You know, all of your girlfriends I’ve met from Wake Forest are such strong women. I’m just impressed.”

Jennifer was one of those women, with our friendship sowed in the freshman hall of 1B Bostwick, along with several others that remain to this day. More friendships were cemented through our Lynks sisterhood and our homes in Poteat, Luter and Davis halls; in the offices of the Old Gold & Black; and at the Worrell House in London.

Over the years, our paths would criss and cross, sometimes deliberately, and sometimes by fate, such as an afternoon in pre-social-media 1998. On a downtown street in Tallahassee, Florida, my Lynks sister Teresa Eyerman (’89) slowed her car mid-block and honked at a jaywalker. She put her head out her window: “Is that you, Joni James?”

Teresa was working as a lawyer post-Florida State University law school. I was the legislative session reporter for the Orlando Sentinel and just months from marrying Mark. Teresa and I hadn’t seen each other since our graduation, but a few months later, when I married Mark in my hometown of Salisbury, North Carolina, Teresa was there to celebrate, along with several other Wake Forest friends. Since that fateful afternoon, Teresa and I have stayed in close touch. We both now live in St. Petersburg, a gift of chosen family, including as too-frequent sheltering partners for Florida hurricanes. My daughter, Joy, calls her “Momma T.”

Teresa was present at Joy’s confirmation into the Episcopal Church in 2015, an event I referenced in a previous essay for Wake Forest Magazine. That essay illuminated the role Wake Forest had played in my faith journey, including the chance to meet Jennifer’s father, the Rev. Francis Wade (P ’89), a retired Episcopal priest and one-time dean of Washington National Cathedral. But it was the picture that accompanied the essay that led to my first introduction to Father Ryan Whitley, who was then a priest at The Nevil Memorial Church of St. George in Philadelphia.

The photograph in Wake Forest Magazine showed me, husband Mark, daughter Joy, friend Teresa and another friend posed before a church altar during Joy’s confirmation ceremony. Ryan dug up my email address through the Wake Network alumni directory and wrote: “By any chance is that church in the picture St. Thomas Episcopal?… That was my wife’s childhood church.”

“Why yes,” I responded, a happy coincidence noted in the temporal world of email.

Or was it? Fast forward another decade and I am sitting on the front row of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in St. Petersburg at Mark’s requiem Mass, humbled and thankful for all who had come to share our family’s burden — including nine of my Lynks sisters and two other friends from Wake Forest. I reflect how these were ties that bind, despite my post-college moves to upstate New York, Oregon, Florida, Texas and back to Florida again.

I thought about how, six years earlier, Mark had been part of the search committee for a new priest that included a trip to Philadelphia. Sometime over that fateful weekend, Ryan had knitted together that the Wake Forest alumna he’d emailed two years earlier was the wife of the man sitting in front of him. The man sitting in front of him was in the confirmation photo. It was Mark.

Ryan was called south to St. Thomas, and Mark’s and Ryan’s friendship took off from there, particularly as Mark served on the vestry, including as senior warden. Ryan provided Mark’s last rites in the hospital. Teresa was also there with us in the final hours. In the subsequent weeks, so many Wake Forest family members would reach out, sending email, texts or old-fashioned snail mail; beautiful flowers; food delivery and generous donations in Mark’s name.

Over the past nine months, I have appreciated anew the gift Wake Forest has been in my life. How the ties sowed more than three decades ago continue to bind, not just for me, but my entire family.

So when I realized Ryan and Jennifer were both in Louisville at the Episcopal convention in June, I texted them both. Jennifer had been at Mark’s funeral and heard Ryan’s beautiful homily. And Ryan had read my essay all those years ago mentioning Jennifer and her father’s role in my faith journey.

Seven hours later, my phone pinged. Ryan had sent me a selfie with Jennifer, both of them smiling, with matching red convention lanyards. Mark would have approved. Once again, the ties that bind were strengthened anew.

— Joni James, who spent 26 years as a newspaper journalist, is now vice president of System Communications for BayCare, West Central Florida’s largest health system.