Let me tell you about C.S.Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia. In 1952 he had been writing to one of his fans an American woman named Joy Gresham, a recent convert to Christianity, and who had been a Communist Jew. She was also going through a hard divorce. He autographed her copy of his book, The Great Divorce. He wrote, "There are three images in my mind which I must continually forsake and replace by better ones: the false image of God, the false image of my neighbours, and the false image of myself.”
What he meant by that quote was that we form an image of God, or of another person, or ourselves after reading a book, hearing a lecture or sermon, or having a conversation with a friend, and we may temporarily get clearer thoughts. We may understand God better. But if we hold onto this new picture too tightly, it becomes an idol that must be broken in order to allow a better image to take its place.
Well, It turns out, he eventually married Joy Gresham. Even though she once brought such joy to his life, that joy ended too soon, because she died of cancer in 1960, after only 4 years of marriage. Lewis fell into grief, even asking whether God was a good God or a "Cosmic Sadist."
In time Lewis wrestled with all the previous ideas he had had of God. They came face to face with the reality of God. Who Lewis thought God was vs. who God really is. He said, “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself.”
And he wrote words that sounded vaguely familiar to those he had written in Joy’s copy of The Great Divorce years before, he reaffirmed his desire to reach beyond his changing perceptions and feelings in order to find what was eternally real: "Not my idea of God, but God.”