I have a confession to make: sometimes I view my relationship to God like a drawn out and badly delivered joke. Where am I in this equation? I am the punchline, of course.

This is very apropos, given my penchence for humor. If humor were be a calling or a spiritual gift, you can bet I'd be constantly on the prayer hotline asking for that one.  Humor can defuse potentially _____ situations.  It's also a great defense mechanism, one of many in my arsenal. However, it's a lot less funny when you are the butt of the joke. Specifically, an evil Genie joke.

It's a standard joke: someone comes across a magic lamp, and behold! It contains a genie waiting to grant them three wishes (except for wishing for more wishes. Apparently all the Genies caught on to that gig a long time ago). So, they make their wishes, and the genie grants his or her wish, exactly as worded. A man asks for a wife 30 years his junior, so instead of making his wife younger, the genie ages the man 30 years.

So, like the poor sap who's the butt of the Genie jokes, so I find myself sometimes with God. I pray, asking for something, sometimes afraid that He will give me what I say that I want, but in the end I don't really want.

This is how I recently came to view a specific situation, regarding a ministry team I served on for many years. When my husband and I first joined up, I had to turn from another dream of mine to go to graduate school, and so I told God, "Fine. But if we are going to join up, I want to go all the way." I'm pretty sure I had no idea  what "all the way" meant at the times. But I am sure I didn't think it meant what actually transpired over those next few years. I ended up the assistant to the head of the ministry, sort of in the "inner circle", and privy to all sorts of information. It was also a lot of pain. My boss wasn't the most pleasant person to work for, and my job was fairly boring most of the time. I was essentially a walking daytimer and message  service. I didn't enjoy my job, but everyone told me it was my "calling" and that only I could do it.

In the end, I finally decided that God couldn't really mean for me to be in a job I hated for the rest of my foreseeable life, and that they must be wrong. There was more for me to do. Shortly after that, my husband and I got the right foot of fellowship out the door of the ministry, and lost relationship with those we thought were our friends for all those years. It was painful. When I look back on this, sometimes I smirk and think that God gave me exactly what I asked for: to go all the way. In this case, apparently all the way meant being dragged through the hoops of the ministry until we left or were kicked out.

I don't always view it this way. Sometimes I think I simply missed Godis will, or missed His timing to leave sooner, or simply I am just thankful for His mercy in releasing from there. But, often I drift back into viewing God as an Evil Genie, granting a fool's poorly worded wish.

At some point we all caricature God, creating Him into our own little Golden Calf, and idol of our choosing. Some, especially those who had absent or abusive fathers, think of God as an angry and stern father or as a punitive taskmaster. Others view God as an aloof spiritual being, who never intervenes on earth, while some think of God as a cruel puppet master, causing and controlling the fates of every suffering soul. A particular caricature in vogue right now is God, the cosmic ATM machine, waiting to indulge our every whim or fancy, like a shiny, new SUV or a new pair of Jimmy Choos.

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Do you have any incorrect views of ways that you caricature God? How do you move beyond them into a correct view of the nature of God?

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