My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast.
Lewis, C. S. (2009-06-02). A Grief Observed (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (p. 51). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
After C.S. Lewis' wife died, he filled nearly four journals with his thoughts and impressions, chronicling and hopefully channeling his grief. The four volumes were published under a pseudonym, for fear that if anyone knew what he was really thinking, it would turn them down a path he didn't wish them to go. It's one thing for an anonymous griever, as it were, to think such things about God. It's another thing for a cherished Christian author to feel that way. Or at least such was the theory.
Eventually the volumes were correctly attributed to him and they are fascinating because of their honesty and for the depth of thought that Lewis is known for bringing to the table. As he processes his grief, he moves from a state of anger with God, where he cannot possibly fathom why it feels like God would be so distant now as opposed to when things were going well to a state of...is it acceptance? It's a deeper understanding, that is for sure.
One such understanding stood out to me, above. It's true that we have an idea about God. We think certain things about God. Each of us has an impression of who God really is, much of which is wrong, but all of which falls ultimately short of a true understanding. I've often quoted A.W. Tozer who said that what we believe about God is the most important thing about us. It's a true statement in it's own right. Our view of God will shape how we view the rest of the world; it is certainly to be the central thought in the life of the Christian person, but the thought is equally true of the skeptic. Not believing in God, or simply not thinking of him at all, is just as important in determining how we view the rest of the world and the cosmos and everything in it.
Lewis would agree, but he would add a caveat. Not only is whatever we believe about God the most important thing about us, but it's so important, in fact, that God himself will seek to root out and destroy any false thoughts or false impressions that we have about him. It does us no good to pray to a God who doesn't really exist; whatever we think God is, Lewis points out, is not a divine idea at all. It's typically our own idea or our own interpretation. As such, it falls short in such immeasurable ways that it is the only loving thing that God can do to weed out such falsities. We need to know the real God, not the one that we made up.
This is another of the "temptations" that C.S. Lewis points out in his book The Screwtape Letters. Wormwood the demon is instructed not so much to stop his subject from praying–although that would be the ideal–but rather to have him pray in such a way where the God he is praying to or the outcome that he is praying for is not based on truth of who God actually is, but rather is based on his own impression of who God is. Thus he will walk away feeling as if he did his righteous duty, but will have had zero impact at all, since whatever he prayed was almost certainly his own will, based on his own idea of God, rather than based on the truth of God and his actual will.
So God takes great pains to destroy the image that we have of him that is inaccurate, and one of the ways that he does that is through suffering. We humans are somewhat of a self-centered bunch, and no matter how righteous or others-focused we appear to be the reality is that most of our efforts and energies are poured into a world that revolves around us. God's blessings toward us, his enthusiasm towards us, his love of us, all seem to wrap around our own self-interest. The second that something appears to not be in our self-interest, we immediately turn on God; we act as if he's this spiteful, vengeful being who, after all this, would make our lives terrible. But here is the trouble: it was never about us to begin with. It wasn't about our self-interest, at least not the way we define it (another mythical area of our belief, the one in which we think we have the means to articulate what really, ultimately, is in our best interest.) If it is about our self-interest, then our self-interest stems from our knowledge of the real God, the real source of life, and not the fanciful version that we learned about in Sunday School. Anything else is a fraud.
So C.S. Lewis would say in his masterful lecture, The Weight of Glory, that we go on settling for mud pies in a slum because we cannot possibly understand what is meant by a holiday at sea. We settle for the mundane and the false, rather than pursuing the truth and the life. And God would have none of that for his most favorite creation.