All I Asked for Was a little Faith: A Journey of Faith to Freedom and Victory

By Alicia Patterson

You know the saying "Be careful what you ask for?" All I Asked for Was a Little Faith details the transformative journey this request took me on over the course of several years. What I thought would be a simple request has turned out to be a lifetime journey. Oftentimes, we ask for things from God without fully knowing or considering exactly what it is that we are asking for. Well, know this, faith is not faith until it has been tested. Faith is a gift that is tried and forged in the fire of God's love. It is a gift that requires processes, and I had no idea of the trials and tribulations that come along with the process of receiving this gift. Like anything that is planted, faith must be planted and then cultivated for it to grow. As you take this journey with me, my prayer is that sharing both the joys and pitfalls I encountered on my walk down the path of faith to freedom will help you in your journey to freedom and victory. You are not alone on this journey, and my hope is that some of the unnecessary difficulties I faced will be a teaching tool to help you to avoid those same mistakes in your walk. Lord, if but one...your will be done.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639036950

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All I Asked for Was a little Faith

A Journey of Faith to Freedom and Victory

Alicia Patterson

ISBN 978-1-63903-694-3 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63903-695-0 (digital)

Copyright © 2022 by Alicia Patterson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

God, investigate my life; get all the facts firsthand. I’m an open book to you; even from a distance, you know what I’m thinking. You know when I leave and when I get back;

I’m never out of your sight.

You know everything I’m going to say before I start the first sentence.

I look behind me and you’re there, then up ahead and you’re there, too—

your reassuring presence coming and going.

This is too much, too wonderful—I can’t take it all in!

Is there any place I can go to avoid your Spirit? To be out of your sight?

If I climb to the sky, you’re there! If I go underground, you’re there!

If I flew on morning’s wings to the far western horizon,

You’d find me in a minute—you’re already there waiting!

Then I said to myself, "Oh, he even sees me in the dark!

At night I’m immersed in the light!"

It’s a fact: darkness isn’t dark to you; night and day, darkness and light,

they’re all the same to you.

Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother’s womb.

I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made!

I worship in adoration—what a creation! You know me inside and out,

you know every bone in my body; You know exactly how I was made,

bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something.

Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth;

all the stages of my life were spread out before you,

The days of my life all prepared before I’d even lived one day.

Your thoughts—how rare, how beautiful! God, I’ll never comprehend them!

I couldn’t even begin to count them—

any more than I could count the sand of the sea.

Oh, let me rise in the morning and live always with you!

—Psalm 139 (MSG)

Acknowledgments

It goes without saying that I must first acknowledge my Lord and Savior, my first love and the Master of my life, my Father God Almighty, without whom I would have never made it to this day. He relentlessly pursues me until I can no longer deny the call He has had on my life from the womb. I thank God for the gifts he has blessed me to steward, my children, Monique, Ashlynn, and Marquis, who unfailingly walked this journey of faith with me. For Gigi’s shuggababy, Genesis, whose birth was truly a new beginning for our family and started the path to restoration and breaking generations of bondage. To the countless others who walked portions of this journey with me, who prayed, interceded, encouraged, and taught me along this journey, I thank you. May God continue to be with you and bless you all on your individual journeys from faith to faith and glory to glory!

Introduction

I will forever remember that day like it was yesterday. It was a late spring evening in April 2012. Out for an evening walk (the activity I do when I need to have a serious talk with my Father), I had just one request of God. The conversation went something like this: Lord…you said, if I have faith the size of a mustard seed that I could command a mountain to move and it would be cast into the sea and nothing would be impossible for me! (Matt. 17:20). God, please, I just need a little faith. Just give me faith the size of a mustard seed to get me through this situation! You know the saying, Be careful what you ask for? I probably should have done my research on a mustard seed prior to asking! A mustard seed, although the smallest of all seeds on earth, once planted has the ability to produce a treelike bush that in some regions can grow upward of thirty feet tall. They grow and spread very quickly and, once mature, have a deep underground root system and an extensive life cycle. In the right conditions, they can literally grow almost forever! Because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance, let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything (James 1:2–4). Perseverance, according to the biblical definition, is the ability to continue in a course of action even in the face of difficulty with only the secure hope in the faithfulness of God as my anchor, for the rest of my life. What I did not realize at the time I prayed that brief prayer was that I essentially was asking God for faith that although very tiny to start with would be tested and tried over and over again in order to produce rapid and continued growth forever! As you join me on this journey of faith, my prayer is that you not only experience the reward of seeing your faith grow but that you will also be equipped with the ability to endure the trials and testing; encouraged to persevere in your faith; and let it have its full effect in your life that you may be made perfect (mature), complete, and lacking no good thing.

1

In the Beginning

But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

—Romans 5:8

As a child, in my home, we were taught to believe in God. Being raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, I was taught to live by a strict and rigid set of rules and regulations but was not taught to have a personal relationship with God. I was a very curious child and often had tons of questions as to why we believed what we did or had to do things a certain way. Instead of my questions being answered, I was often told to be quiet and was seen as rebellious for even questioning what I was expected to just accept. Now this is in no way meant to cast negative light as I have many people I love who are still involved in the religion, and I wish to see them come to a true knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But as a result, when I became an adult, I absolutely had no desire to be a part of anybody’s church. I ran as far away from anything even remotely resembling religion as I could, for as long as I could. I still acknowledged my belief in God but set my own standard as to what a good person was supposed to look like, but that was it. I never had the desire or felt the need to do anything beyond that. Shunning the moral values I was raised with, I found myself pregnant at eighteen years old. With a new baby to raise alone, my standards of what a good person was would quickly go out of the window. Providing for my child became my number one priority, but doing so my way and under my own set of rules would lead to many serious mistakes. Shortly after becoming pregnant with my second child a few years later, my way of providing would lead to me being arrested for a felony drug possession and facing ten years in prison. I quickly came to realize that my way was not working and knew it was time to start thinking about doing things differently. I realize now that it was only by God’s grace and mercy and because of His plan for my life that I was saved from what should have been a ten year prison sentence. Instead, I was allowed to serve ten years of probation without adjudication of guilt and once successfully served, resulted in the felony being wiped from my record as if it never happened. Today it is a continuous reminder of the same way Jesus died on the cross and shed His precious blood for us, making the way for our sins to be erased and giving us a clean slate with God.

Around 2002, I really started to feel a nudge in my heart, and I decided that in order to become a better example for my children, I would have to seriously commit to making some changes to my lifestyle. Partying regularly, selling drugs, smoking weed all day, having enough casual relationships for each day of the week with men, women, other people’s husbands, etc. was not exactly conducive to raising two young ladies. Although I’d shunned my religious upbringing and despite the current lifestyle I was living, I wanted my children to be raised with morals and values. So after numerous invites, I finally decided to accept my sister’s invitation to accompany her to a church she had recently started attending. To my pleasant surprise, nobody gave me the side-eye or turned up their nose at the very short black mini skirt I wore because I only owned club attire. That was enough for me to decide I would give this church stuff a try. After all, it would be good for my girls, now ten and four years old. Although my oldest sister was not at all interested, my younger sister and I were able to convince my brother-in-law to start attending with their children. This was good! I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to try and make these changes by myself. After the passing of my mother in 2000, my brother-in-law had become the rock of our family and was the one who pretty much held us all together. Shortly afterward, I found out that I was pregnant with my son, and this sealed the deal. I knew I could not raise a boy to be a man in this current society without some structure, morals, and values. I was determined that my male child would not become a statistic. So I dedicated my life and the life of my son to God. I promised the Lord that I would raise him to be a respectable, productive citizen and a man of God. Everything was going well as we began to attend church regularly as a family, embraced by the people of the congregation, and began to help serve.

However, about nine months after my son was born, our family would suffer a very devastating blow. The rock of our family, my beloved brother-in-law, was shot and murdered on his way home from a night out with his best friend. I could not believe that God would allow something like this to happen, especially after we’d all started going to church and trying our best to live right. I was angry and withdrew from my newfound relationship with God, believing that there was no way He could care about me or my family and allow this type of tragedy in our life. Why was I putting in all this work, giving up things I really still enjoyed doing, for someone who would allow such an important part of my family to be taken away? I stopped attending church, what little prayer life I had all but ceased, and I resumed my previous destructive behaviors.

Although God would continue to tug at my heart to return to him, I was mad and I was stubborn. It would take a simple question from my son, who now was almost three years old, to remind me of the promise I’d made to God when he was born. After I’d just finished getting high one day, he walked into my room and asked if I was going to die. Of course not, I answered him. In his sweet, innocent baby voice he made the most simple yet truthful statement: If you keep smoking, you will, he said. At that point, I knew I had a decision to make and decided to give this God thing a try again…but He’d better not disappoint me this time.

I know you can probably relate to a time where you’ve felt like God disappointed or let you down. A time when you thought things would work in your favor, but instead, they took a left turn or something or someone was taken from you without there seeming to be any good explanation. It is in those times when it feels as if God has completely turned His back on you or ignored your cry for help. What do you do in those times? We