YDSOA

There are some stories that simply have to be told. This is one of them. It’s about a code between two people.  A group of letters that stand for something.  Some phrase, some saying, random letters that carry a message…like the one in the letters YDSOA.

So what’s so special about that, you ask? People do that all the time.

 Oooh… but not like this. This code is different. The story of this code begins in 1949.  Are you trying to figure out what it stands for yet?  Sure you are.  Keep reading.

On Valentine’s Day, Theresa Wilson (The Chicken Lady) asked me to help her and Angela Beck deliver a gourmet dinner to Angela’s parents, David and Doris McMichael.

When we arrived, David showed us the lovely Valentine card he bought for Doris. It was signed; “I love you, David, YDSOA.”  I asked what the letters stood for and Angela smiled and said; “That’s their code. They’ve had that code since we were born.”  

I asked David, after praying about it, if I could tell the story of their code.  He kindly agreed and met me at the church one afternoon. I turned my recorder on and listened as a man with an incredibly detailed memory talked about his life with his high school sweetheart.

This is the story of David and Doris McMichael.

Picture a Sunday morning church service.  The place is Charleston, South Carolina. The pastor is preaching, the people are listening, and somewhere in the pews, two sisters are whispering to each other about a young man in the choir. 

“I’ll bet you can’t get a date with David McMichael,” Louise whispered to her sister. “I’ll bet I can,  I’ll show you!”  Doris said.  Now to hear David tell it, that was about the same time that he began to notice Doris. That was the summer between their junior and senior year of high school.  David remembers clearly the first time he and Doris did anything together.

Some members of the youth group were riding their bicycles to a friend’s house. David asked Doris if she wanted to go. She said yes and sat across the bar of his bicycle. “That was the first time we did anything together,” he said.

After that bicycle ride, the two of them started going together. “We would write little notes at night or something, and the next day at school, I’d pass her a note, or she’d pass me a note,” he said, “and there would just be little notes between us.  As we went along, I came up with a code and I would sign those little notes with that code YDSOA, and that’s how it started. I started doing it then and from then on, every piece of correspondence I’ve given to her has had that on it. That was 1949.”

David and Doris were  married  July 15, 1951, one year after graduation.  When David proposed, he told Doris to think about her answer because he needed to know if she could live as a minister’s wife.

 From the age of 14, David felt the Lord calling him to the ministry. He likes to say Doris didn’t know any better, so she said yes to his proposal.

After high school, David worked at several jobs, from being a meat cutter clerk, to being accepted into the Apprentice Machinist Program in the Charleston Naval Shipyard, to being a Tool and Die Maker for Goodyear Aircraft in Akron Ohio. During this time he and Doris were building their lives and their family.

When David was 24, he came home from work one night and sat down on the couch. It was midnight. Doris and their son Davey were sleeping. That’s when he felt the Lord telling him it was time to enter the ministry. “I heard that eternal voice, just as clear as it could be, say “David, you know what I want, and if you’ll be my minister, I’ll provide for you ,and care for you and your family all the way through,” and there was a little pause, then He said “But if you refuse to be my minister, I’m going to love you and take care of you because you’re my son.” There were tears in his eyes as he related that memorable moment. “All the time I thought God was going to make me enter the ministry, but when I realized He loved me so much that He would never make me do His will, it broke my heart, and I finally had that perfect peace of God.”

Right then he slid off the couch, knelt down, used the couch like an alter, and prayed; “Lord, I don’t know if that’s you or not, but I’m taking it for truth that it’s you, and I believe you’re saying you want me to enter the ministry, and I’m gonna do it, and if you don’t want me to, you better stop me.”

The next morning, after he shared the news with Doris, he applied to Furman University. He was accepted and for the next 43 years their family was in the ministry. By now he and Doris had two children. Sharon was born  in Akron, Ohio.  When David entered Furman U. Davey was 5 yrs. old and Sharon was 6 months old . In his first semister at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Angela was born. He preached until the last day of 1999, when he retired from right here at Mt. Zion.

One day, just before he retired, David took Doris to the doctor for an appointment. She had forgotten some things recently and they wanted to get a checkup to make sure her health was good. When the doctor’s report came back, there were initial signs of Alzheimer’s.

It is now 2009 and David and Doris are still in love and are ministering to each other. In David’s words, his ministry now is to Doris and hers is still to him. “Sometimes,” he says, “I will stand in front of the mirror with Doris, point to the mirror and say; that’s David and that’s Doris…they go together, and she’ll smile. I go up to her and hug her, I rub her back and say; Oh I love you, you’re my darlin, I say that all the time. I feed her on it. She needs that.  Sometimes I’ll say; I love you more than you love me, and sometimes she’ll say; No you don’t, I love you more than you love me.  Every night when I get in bed next to Doris I say; Good night darlin,  I love you.”  

 In  1st Corinthians 13, it says: Love is patient, love is kind, is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

 “I cannot remember a single time since our high school days,” he said, “that I’ve given her a gift, or a card or anything, that I haven’t signed it with the letters YDSOA. That has everything to do with why I’m doing what I’m doing (caring for Doris), because of that expression to her back then. Back in high school. That was it. That was the commitment.”

And that’s the story.

In 1949, in Charleston, South Carolina, sitting in a church pew, Doris whispered to her sister she would get a date with David McMichael, and she did. That’s when David made a commitment to her that he honors today. It’s worth noting that in high school, Doris was voted as the one with the ‘best personality’, while David was voted as ‘most dependable.’

Now about that code: YDSOA…would you like to know what it stands for?

As Angela told me that night at their house…”It’s their code.  They’ve had that code since we were born…and no one knows what it stands for except them.”

That’s David and Doris.

 They go together.

 YDSOA

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