Pastor Patrick Figueroa

Pastor Patrick Figueroa (http://www.driven2shift.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=55&Itemid=72)

That night I felt like Peter, sitting next to Jesus in Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”. Patrick Figueroa was my spiritual father and mentor, as well as everyone else’s at the table. We were all having one of those “spiritual” discussions about where we were all going to go and what we were going to do now that Patrick was moving.

Just a week before, on a Wednesday night at Revolution Youth Ministries, I was sitting in service when my old friend Chase approached me with a harsh look on his face. I knew something was up because we weren’t on good terms and he seemed like he had something important to tell me. Then what he said was like a slap across the face: “Ay man you heard? Pat’s movin’ to Kentucky.” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing; I didn’t want to believe it. Then Patrick, in tears, broke that dreadfully unwanted news to the entire youth group; he was leaving to start up the youth at an old friend's church. This was the last night I was going to get to spend with Pat before he left, and it was the night I had realized that he was my hero.

I had grown up the past four years with Patrick. He became the middle school youth pastor when I was in sixth grade and since then we had grown close. He was like a father to me. The past four years I had spent at his side, and the past four years I had learned so much from him. I could rely on him for anything, which tended to be my ride to church.

On those car rides is where Patrick and I really bonded. He would ask about my week, how I was doing, who that “new chick” on my myspace was, and all sorts of seemingly nosy questions. It had irritated me at first but I had begun to realize that he did it so he could see where I was at and how I thought. He ministered to me in all areas of my life, whether it was relationships, family issues, school, friends, and most of all the things I couldn’t dare mention to anybody. Patrick had a way of getting me to tell him everything, even things I was uncomfortable with even thinking about, but somehow I had no problem telling him. I could vent out all of my thoughts and struggles with him and he wouldn’t judge me. I didn’t appreciate it at first, I saw it as intrusive; but now I appreciate it as a type of fatherly concern. Patrick always helped me out and always strived to keep me on the “straight and narrow path,” as he might put it, with a sort of religious humor.

I always listened to his wise words and took them to heart, but hardly applied them to my life. Most of the time I had disregarded his words, and he knew this, yet he always stuck by me and loved and cared regardless of my actions. I began to see that his fatherly unconditional love was a good example, if not perfect example of God’s love and concern. I assume that Patrick’s intrusiveness was his way of, how he’d put it, “sowing a seed,” in me that I would come to grow and learn.

Patrick not only sowed seed in me, but others around me as well. There are plenty of times when I have seen Pat go out of his way to minister to someone in desperate need. On one of our car rides a girl had called him in tears for the loss of her nephew; right then and there he jerked the car over to the side of the road and prayed with her over the phone. It amazed me how important it was to him that he should pull the car over to pray with her.

But that night, as we were gathered around the table, it had hit me like a ton of bricks, how much Patrick had done for me. I realized how much I had relied on him over the years, and how much I could depend on him. I was enlightened to how selfless, faithful, and obedient he to his God -- mostly through his faithfulness in continuing to sow seed in me regardless of how hard-headed I tended to be. I learned and have changed incredibly over those past four years thanks to Patrick’s faith in me, and above all, God. He’s the perfect representation of how a man of God should be, and he’s the type of man I hope to become.

Patrick and his wife, Danielle Figueroa