Sisterchicks Say Ooh La La! by Robin Jones Gunn Page A

together. As he dipped his long spoon into his dish of ice cream, he seemed to be telling her a story that made her smile. At another table a man sat reading a newspaper while the woman across from him was pressing buttons on her cell phone. No one in this friendly café seemed to notice that the three of us weren’t laughing in French.
    I loved listening to Jill laugh. Her wonderful giggle took the sting out of my grand faux pas.
    We settled into a chatty sort of conversation by the time we were drinking ourselves down to the layer of chocolate moustaches. Jill told us this was her fourth trip to Paris. Leading art tours was a midlife sort of dream thather best friend, Kathy, had talked her into pursuing.
    “It’s been wonderful,” she said. “I haven’t had any significant problems during the past three trips.”
    “Well, then you might not want to hang around us too much,” Amy said. “We do seem to attract more than our share of ‘special moments,’ as my mother-in-law would call them. We’re not like this at home. Really.”
    “You will forgive me, won’t you, if I have a hard time believing that,” Jill said.
    “I guess we do have our moments at home, too, but it’s all been a little more compact and intense since we left,” Amy said. “If we didn’t have the assurance that God was taking care of us every step of the way, I’m sure we’d both be a mess by now.”
    Jill smiled and nodded.
    I knew then that the three of us had more in common than a bunch of giggles.
    “It’s His mercies, you know,” Jill said. “They really are new every morning.”
    “Yes, they are,” Amy agreed.
    I didn’t want any of this to end. The sound of Jill’s laughter. The way the waning sunlight was coming through the front window of Angelina’s and touching off firefly sparks from Amy’s jewelry every time she turned her head. Each glittery bead in her necklace seemed to have its own spark of life. All of them were dancing around her neck like a Renoir painting packed withvibrant Victorians picnicking on a summer afternoon.
    Every woman of every generation deserved to sit in the sunlight with such friends on such an afternoon and laugh and sip chocolate and know in her heart that God’s mercy would be new again the next morning.
    Jill’s art lessons had gone inside me. My eyes had been opened to impressionism. These things around me were familiar: Amy, chocolate, tables, chairs. But something was different. Ethereal. Something mysterious was at work in the space between my surroundings and me. A sort of translucent beauty that was hidden in that untouchable space where there are no maverick molecules.
    How does a human capture that sort of nearly invisible motion and magnificence?
    My heart beat a strange rhythm. It was as if something eternal had passed over my thoughts. I almost glimpsed something beyond comprehension. But what? It came so close my spirit reached with all five fingers of my senses, longing to touch whatever it was.
    Was that You, God?
    I wanted to run after Him. Him! God. Amy’s Papa. My almighty, omnipotent, heavenly Father who was untouchable and unfathomable.
    He passed by, and my heart surged at the possibility.
    A clear thought settled on me. God was the artist. Every molecule was set in obedient motion to Him in thisspace between Himself and His subject. That space swirled with calculated mystery. Yet I, the subject of His affection, was the maverick. Ever resisting.
    “Ready, Lisa?”
    “I’m sorry. What?”
    “Jill just said she has to get going to make her flight. Do you want to leave, too, or stay a little longer?”
    “We can go. Sorry. I just got a little spacey there for a minute.”
    “Ah, the joys of jet lag,” Jill said. “Try to take lots of vitamin C. And sleep, of course, when you can.”
    We exchanged our contact information, and before Jill caught a taxi at the curb, she hugged us both warmly and invited us to visit her any time in Wellington. We returned the