Pedro
When I sat down with Pedro one morning at a quaint little coffee shop in Studio City, I found it impossible not to like the guy. It wasn’t because of his quick witted humor, his swag, or the fact that he has what I hope to one day have, a beautiful wife and newborn son, but after a long and candid conversation with Pedro I would soon learn what I respected and admired most about him.
Pedro is currently in a season of redefining through suffering. “My son was just born and I was holding him when I got the call that my Dad only has fifteen months to live. It wrecked me. I was in bed for three days.” Pedro’s father is battling stage 4 bone cancer. It was in these difficult moments that Pedro had to either question his faith or remain steadfast in trusting in God and His plan, even during his times of agony and uncertainty. “You start questioning God, asking him difficult questions. ‘God I thought you were good and all loving, but why would you let this happen.’ But God isn’t afraid of us asking Him difficult questions.” Ultimately Pedro expressed that during times such as these we must conform our lives according to our belief that God is good, He is in control, and we must trust in Him, even when it makes no sense, or why believe at all. “When you believe a chair will hold you up when you sit in it, you’re not going to check the screws and bolt before sitting in it, you just sit.”
We must remain in prayer even when we do not understand God’s plan or our current situation. “If years ago someone offered me a billion dollars or the truth about prayer I would pick the truth without hesitation. The truth being that prayer is not about always asking for what we want, but aligning our will with God’s will,” says Pedro. Through our prayers we slowly begin to relinquish our hearts, our desires, our will to God’s will, and are filled with peace and new desires. We begin to ask the Lord what to pray for. When we delight in the Lord He gives us all the desires of our hearts because it is His desire placed in our hearts. Pedro also went on to say that our prayers are folded into the cosmic fabric that is God’s will, that will come to pass in His perfect timing and by His omniscient and omnipotent command.
“When I pray I ask that my Father be healed of his cancer, I want my son to know him, but if that’s not God’s will I hope my prayers affected something in some way. Maybe he lives a little longer because of my prayers.”
As our coffee ran low our conversation shifted to his past, when he was a baseball player destined for the Major Leagues, until an abrupt injury ended his baseball career early. “While I was playing baseball I wish I could go back in time and slap myself and say ‘The most important thing in life is Jesus.’” Pedro then reminisced about the times he would drive his teammates from training camp to a strip club multiple nights a week, but would not partake, and how he struck up a conversation with them one night about Jesus while driving back to camp. “The conversation went from boobies to Jesus,” says Pedro with a grin on his face. “They said the sinner’s prayer and gave their lives to Jesus in the car.”
Pedro recounts another time when he was on the phone with his then girlfriend, now wife, while driving back from training camp. “She told me to pull over and pray, and to ask God where He wants me to go, so I did. I heard it clearly in my soul when God said 'I don’t care about where you’re going, I care about who you are.’” We become so obsessed with our purpose and what we are supposed to be doing that we neglect our hearts and our current relationship with the Lord.
When asked what piece of advice he would give his younger self, Pedro replied “Everything you need is in your walk with Jesus. Everything. The more you walk with Him the more you walk like Him.”
Pedro would go on to say that the absolute pinnacle of Christianity is not our destinations we look to get to in our lives, or the works we will do in the Lord's name, but the pinnacle is the moment we simply say “yes” to Jesus and surrender our lives to Him. It’s a paradigm shift when we place Jesus above all and everything else is secondary. Our source of happiness, peace, fulfillment, and our identity will be found in Jesus, and not in our successes or works that will come to pass when following the Lord. The little golden statue we hold on a stage while we thank God, the book deals, traveling the world, all are “peanuts,” as Pedro puts it, compared to the moment we accept Jesus into our hearts and His grace is extended to us.
During our walk with the Lord, we will walk through peaks and valleys, but during times of apprehension and uncertainty we look back to the top of the mountain as a reminder of what Jesus did for us on the cross, and His grace and mercy.
After a long conversation with Pedro, what I respected and admired most about him was his ability to not be a slave to the anxieties of the future, or oppressed by his past, but be truly present in the moment, walking with the Lord. He stands calmly in the eye of the storm with a smile on face and love in his heart because his life is founded in Christ Jesus. Nothing else matters.
92 stories to go.
