Love Song
I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine.
Song of Solomon 6:3
The time had come to look for a job.
Bible study was great, street witnessing was exciting, but a wife and two hungry kids were something else. Michael spoke to Chuck Smith about it, and Chuck introduced him to Robert Ward, an elder in his church and president of a burglar alarm company. It took four interviews, but he finally landed a job as salesman and was given the territory of Los Angeles. That meant another move. The Christmas season approached, and Michael was telephoning his ex-wife every day and writing her love letters.
Sandra did a lot of praying. As she drove to Long Beach to her classes at the university, she asked God to give her some sort of assurance that she and this man, who had caused her so much emotional agony, could make it together. They had been so far apart. It was as if he had been standing on one rim of the Grand Canyon and she on the other. One day, as she was driving to school, she heard God tell her, "Behold, I make all things new" (Rev. 21:5). It was so real she had to pull off the road and park. From
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that minute she knew that if God was going to do it, He would make it happen. She told Michael later, "It doesn't matter how I feel about it or how you feel. What I do, I have to do out of obedience, whether I want to or not." But in her heart she really did want to remarry him.
By January both Michael and Sandra had taken care of unfinished business in breaking off their involvements with other people. Then Michael put in a call to Chuck Smith.
"Oh, Chuck, this is Mike MacIntosh."
"How are you doing, Mike?"
"Well, I was wondering if you could marry Sandy and me."
"How about April third?"
"Yeah, O.K. That's fine Good-bye, Chuck."
For reasons known only to himself, Pastor Chuck had set the wedding date three months away. In the interim Michael had an immediate housing problem; and with no money and nothing else available, he moved into Sandra's Tustin apartment. After all, they had been married, they had two children, and they were to be remarried. So what was the problem? It was that God said no — no to sex, that is.
"The Lord told me that even though we had been married before, we now need to be married in Him," Michael told his former wife. So Sandra slept in one bedroom and Melinda and David in the other, while Michael pulled out the rollaway bed. A friend who lived across the hall knocked on the door one morning at six o'clock; it seems he had tried to start his car and found the battery dead. When Michael answered the door, the friend stared at him and then at the disheveled sheets on the sofa. "What goes on, MacIntosh?"
"I can't sleep with her till we're married."
"But she's your own wife!"
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"It's the spiritual principle that matters."
The man shook his head. "I guess you're serious about this Jesus Christ stuff, aren't you?"
Three hundred people gathered on April 3, 1971, for what was perhaps the most unusual marriage ceremony ever conducted in Calvary Chapel. Hippies, beach-bums, car salesmen, Disneyland performers, bartenders, church people, student radicals, Stephens College graduates — all converged to witness the event. The wedding party was made up of the bride's parents, Wilfrid and Dorothy Riddet, who were now California residents; the maid of honor, Betsy Thorsen, who was later to marry the Olympic decathlon champion, Rafer Johnson; the best man, Michael's brother Kent; and the ecstatic flower girl, three-and-a-half-year-old Melinda, child of the bride and groom. The mother of the bridegroom was absent, as was the father. Music was provided by Love Song, headed by Chuck Girard and including Tommy Coomes, Fred Field, and Jay Truax. They were dressed in Levis and open-necked shirts.
Things started normally enough, with Calvary Chapel friends serving as ushers. Dorothy Riddet, mother of the bride, was escorted to her pew. Waiting in an anteroom were Pastor Chuck, the best man, and the bridegroom, the latter wearing brown slacks, a blue shirt, and white sports jacket. Chuck led the two brothers in a brief prayer, and at that moment the Lord put a question to Michael's heart: "What would you like for a wedding present?" He thought of all the people who had come to the nuptials and decided nothing could be better than that all of them should be saved and come to know the Lord. And God spoke to his heart again: "That's your wedding present."
The music began, and the miracle of love seemed to float across the church pews on waves of sound. Chuck
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Girard started the weeping himself during their powerful rendition of "Feel the Love." He managed to regain his composure, but then the other musicians began to crack. People in the pews reached for their handkerchiefs. Probably the only dry eyes belonged to the bride's parents and Sandra's two closest girlfriends, who were all too aware of what phase one of her marriage had been like.
Little Melinda now came down the aisle, carrying a bouquet of white daisies Dorothy Riddet had gathered from her Santa Ana backyard. (The Riddets were determined to invest nothing in what they considered not only their daughter's redundancy, but an out-and-out bad deal.) Melinda walked toward her waiting father, intending to show him her flowers, but tripped on her long dress and scattered daisies all over the carpet. From the pews came gasps and titters. Michael stooped to help his daughter pick up her posies, and as he did he began to cry. This is my daughter, he thought. I've got her back.
Sandra now appeared at the head of the aisle on her father's arm. From the day she was born, Bill Riddet had looked forward to the hour when he would escort his daughter down the aisle at her wedding. Las Vegas seemed to have cheated him out of that thrill, but here he was in a retake! Sandra was attired in a floor-length organdy dress, long-sleeved, Juliet style. This time she was wearing shoes. Her bouquet was made up of roses and ranunculi, also snipped from the Riddet garden. As she walked toward Michael with her father, the bridegroom made a quick assessment of where he stood. Everything I destroyed, he thought, God is giving back to me. Here I am, and by rights I should be dead. But in spite of all the pills I swallowed and all the crazy things I did with my life, I'm healed. This is really what being born again means! God is restoring my whole life to me. I am nothing but a complete salvage operation, a sinner saved by grace.
By the time Sandra reached him, Michael was crying
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again. He stepped forward to take her arm and was so blinded by his tears that he took Bill Riddet's arm instead. Tears were dripping off his chin. Sandra looked at him demurely with just a touch of tenderness. "Where's your happy Jesus face?" she whispered. But Michael was speechless; she had to help him up the three steps to the pulpit platform where, exactly a year before, he had knelt in an empty sanctuary and prayed to God for help.
I've got to pull myself together, Michael thought. I'll watch Pastor Chuck; that's what I'll do. He's solid and steady. I'll watch him and I'll be all right. He squared his shoulders and faced the minister.
"Dearly beloved," said the pastor in his kindly mellow baritone, "we are gathered here together—" He paused and tears formed in his eyes.
At that moment Michael lost all control and bawled openly. It was a while before the ceremony could go on.
But go on it did: the wedding vows were said, Michael and Sandra were once more husband and wife, Melinda and David had their daddy back, and three hundred people burst into applause and cheers. Since the newlyweds' cash was in short supply, the wedding reception that followed was potluck.
The bride and groom had spent the first night of their first honeymoon sleeping in a Ford Falcon on a street in Santa Barbara. This honeymoon, thanks to a wedding gift from brother Jim Riddet and a collection taken up by fellow employees at Tel-Alarm, they spent at the historic old Hotel del Coronado across the harbor from San Diego. They occupied the cheapest and smallest room in the elegant hostelry, definitely not the VIP suite that was the lodging in the past of presidents McKinley, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, King Kalakaua of Hawaii, Emperor Haile Selassie, and the soon-to-be Duchess of Windsor, Mrs. Bessie Wallis Warfield Spencer Simpson.
