God or Genie?

posted by Navigators on January 29th, 2026 in Person of God | Prayer

By Lindsey Swatzentruber, Canberra Labouring Community

 How do you respond to unanswered prayer?

What do you do with disappointment, waiting, uncertainty, the inability to control a situation, with seeing the grief that it causes those you love? How do you respond after asking God daily, sometimes hourly, for months, a year, three years, five, eight, and not have Him answer but have increased trouble? Where do you rest when there is no rest?

These are some of the questions that I have been asking as God has been calling me to draw near to Him in prayer and to cling to His character.

What, after all, is the difference between God and a genie?

A genie, you ask because of what they can do and because they are bound to do it for you. You get your three wishes, and you had better think awfully carefully about them because if you get them wrong –  “tough luck!” – you have lost your chance.

God isn’t like that. With Him, it is not simply because of what He can do but because of who He is that I ask. With a genie you have to ask in just the right way or your wish may be twisted somehow to turn on you for ill. You need to think of all possible contingencies and it is your responsibility to ensure that you “chess” it out first so that it goes well for you. With God, He is the one who has planned every contingency already and done so for my good – whether or not He may answer my request in the way I want. He is not bound to obey me and that is good because, like with the danger of a genie, I cannot know all the possible scenarios and what will work out best for me. But I can trust that, because of who He is, He is working it out somehow for my good. A genie is called according to my purposes but I am called according to His.

So, I have two paths, two choices in the way I respond to every unanswered prayer:

Path 1

I can see God as a genie called up according to my purposes, to what I want to do and desire, to what I think is best for me. And then, if He does not grant my wish, that leads me to disappointment – not with my purposes or plan but with Him. It leads me to the conclusion that He is somehow not powerful enough and actually leaves His character entirely out of the equation because I never considered His purposes and character in the asking. I assume from the start that my will is the highest good, the greatest end, the only answer and so my evaluation of His character depends on Him fulfilling my criteria. I then become “god” and decide what is good, and if He does not fulfill “good” according to my definition then neither is He good. And because I am the one who defines it then, whether I recognise it or not, I do not see Him as God.

This path leads only to bitterness and a darkened self-worship with self as “god”, which is sure to disappoint because I was never made to fulfill that role.

Or Path 2

I can see that because He is God, I am called according to His purposes and acknowledge that He alone has the authority and character to define what is “good” for me. This means that when my prayer goes unanswered it cannot be because He was unable to do so. Nor could it be because He was failing to give me what is best – the only option is that in His supreme goodness His best is better than mine. It is that He has more in store for me, not less. This response answers the serpent’s “Did God really say?…” which questions His authority to define the good as well as His intent to provide it – it questions His character.

This path eliminates the trajectory of bitterness and darkest despair because it trusts that what He says is trustworthy – because He is. That He “is righteous in all His ways and kind in all His deeds”. That He does cause absolutely “all things to work together for the good of those who love Him, who are called according to His purposes” and that He “is good, His lovingkindness is everlasting and His faithfulness to all generations.”

But it also does something more than simply keep me from despair and bitterness. Because, if I follow it, if I recognise that “though He slay me, yet will I hope in Him” because “where else have I to go because He alone has the words of eternal life?” If I trust that He is God and defines what is good for me in His unfailing love, I have no other option but to cling to Him, trusting desperately that He will somehow come through for me – even if I have no idea how. And in that desperation, that pleading, crying out to Him to fulfill the good He promised and to show me His goodness because I cannot see how His plan is good or best at all – He does. He tenderly comes alongside me in my weakness and gives me more of Himself. He shows me that He is my greatest good and that in Him there is joy and peace that come apart from my prayers being answered – a kind which even the answering could not bring. It is when I am in desperation with Him that He so often comes to me with more of Himself, and the dependence on Him causes me to “set the Lord continually before me; because He is at my right hand, I will not be shaken. Therefore my heart is glad and my glory rejoices….because in His presence is fullness of joy and in His right hand there are pleasures forever.”

So, is He God to me, or is He a genie? Is He called according to my purposes or am I called according to His? And do I trust Him, because of His character, to define the good for me?

I like what Betsie ten Boom, who died in prison for obeying God, wrote while in prison to her sister Corrie. She said,

“The most important part of our task will be to tell everyone who will listen that Jesus is the only answer to the problems that are disturbing the hearts of men and nations. We shall have the right to speak because we can tell from our experience that His light is more powerful than the deepest darkness … How wonderful that the reality of His presence is greater than the reality of the hell about us.”

Lindsey and her husband, Levi, live in Canberra, where they work with students at the Australian National University. To find out more about them and their ministry, visit: navigators.org.au/staff/swartzentruberll/