Thank You, Friend

For several years, I’ve had a wonderful online friend named Mike. I knew him better by his screen-name, Metochoi, under which he moderated a Yahoo Group called Gothard_Discussion. I found the group shortly after my divorce, and several years after leaving the parachurch organization called The Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) and its homeschool program, The Advanced Training Institute of America (ATIA).

I’d been involved with IBLP since I was 12, attending seminars and eventually going to work at the organization’s headquarters in Oak Brook, IL. My family joined ATIA when I was in my early twenties. I’d thought it was a good thing at the time, but later experience would prove my involvement with IBLP and ATIA to be the single most disastrous decision I could ever have made. (But all of that is a story for another time. Today’s post is about my friend, Metochoi, whom most of us affectionately call Met.)

I don’t know a lot about Met’s personal life. I know he had a loving family and that he had a lot of health issues, which he battled heroically. I know that he had a keen sense of humour, a temperament that could run the gamut from gentle affection to cantankerous curmudgeonliness, and a deep, abiding love of the Lord.

Mike passed away on Tuesday, 15 December 2009. And I know that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people whose lives will be the poorer for his loss. Mine is one of them.

You see, Met loved the Lord. And his love of the Lord spurred him to promote God’s Truth at all costs. He took a lot of flak from a lot of poeple over the years because his Gothard_Discussion was devoted to examining the teachings of IBLP/ATIA and exposing false teaching. There are a lot of people who really don’t like what Met was doing. And they were ugly about it.

But there are many, many of us who were helped by Met’s teachings. Met was a skilled logician, who insisted on accurate and careful analysis. He wouldn’t let a discussion devolve into ad hominem attacks, and he was very good at finding logical fallacies and purging them from arguments. He helped me clarify my thought processes so that I could accurately analyse the teachings, both past and present, that I was exposed to.

It was Met who first taught me about Grace. The real truth about Grace. If that was the only thing that I ever learned from Met, then his life was worth the living, because Met’s careful, patient teaching revealed to me that I had been trying, all my Christian life, to somehow earn God’s love. To “pay Him back” for what He did for me through my pathetic attempts at service and following all the little “rules for pleasing God.”

It was Met who took me back to the Scriptures to show me that I didn’t have to stress myself out like that. That I was not going to lose my salvation because I had divorced my husband, didn’t go to church every Sunday, didn’t tithe consistently, didn’t read my Bible every day, and sometimes wore jeans instead of skirts. It was Met who freed me from the terrible, terrible bondage of “positive peer pressure” and of the teachings of modern-day Judaizers.

It was also Met who helped bring me back into a relationship with my Father, by showing me that my remembrance of my sins — sins that I had repented of and asked forgiveness for — was an affront to the loving, forgiving, gracious power of God.

After the cult-like influence of IBLP/ATIA and then the devastation of divorce, I was afraid of God. I thought God must hate me. That if I ever had been saved, I had surely lost it irretrievably. And that if I never had been saved, well, there was no chance of God taking me on now. I didn’t pray. I didn’t sing. I was afraid to take Communion. I was afraid to open my Bible. It had been used viciously, as a weapon against me, for so long that I was truly terrified of it. I was sure that opening it up was just inviting God to chop me in bits for my badness. It was Met who gently and gradually brought me back to the love and joy that I had felt in my youth. God used Met to erode the doubts and fears and pain, and to heal my broken, battered soul, and restore me to fellowship with my Saviour and Lord — and Father.

I am so grateful that God caused me to “stumble across” the Gothard_Discussion group. Because God used that group, and especially Met’s insightful posts and insistent bombardment of the walls of false teaching, to free me for joyful, abandoned service in His Kindgom.

I am happy for Met. He’s been promoted, you see. He can now serve God face-to-face, and without the physical suffering that he has endured for so long. He is now in the presence of the Lord and Saviour whom he loved so well. And even though I knew him only online, I am going to miss my friend so very much.

I had so many things I wanted to ask Met. So many questions that I was certain he would be able to help me find truly Biblical answers to. And I guess that God’s allowing him to go Home means either that there is someone else God will bring into my life to help and guide me, or that God feels I’m ready to walk a bit on my own, just holding His hand. But I shall miss Met.

Thank you, Met, for your love of the Lord and your love for His Sheep. Thank you for your time, your energy, your suffering, and your patient teaching. You have been greatly loved, and you will be greatly missed from now until the day we meet face-to-face in the Lord’s Kingdom.

Tags: ATIA, Christianity, death, eulogy, faith, friends, good works, grace, IBLP, kindness, logic, online relationships, Religion, True Stories, truth