Imagination and intimacy

I was praying and thought I'd not felt God's warmth in my prayers.

I imagined I was reaching out to God and he was thin and sinewy. My hand had not made contact yet he was like the rear leg of a stretching young cat, but then the image shifted to the back of a greyhound dog. 
Then I wondered, what does God feel like to me and why? 
What image did I want to have in my head and was any image appropriate? 
Why was my image of God somewhat stretched, tight, or aloof? When this image felt inappropriate I briefly imagined a more portly older man's belly but switched to the soft, relaxed, muscled shoulders and broad back of a fatherly, early middle aged man.

Finally it occurred to me to wonder why an image at all? Was I making an idol?

This all said far more about me than God. Had my prayers become a ritual? Had my heart become utilitarian in my prayers? Why did I think that to imagine God as anything would improve my prayers? Why did my prayers need improving?

Intimacy is often the process of twisting/relating something or someone to fit an image in our minds. We feel closer if things are familiar and, unfortunately, the people, things, or situations closest to us may be to some extent imagined and only really existing in our minds.

Why is it not right to imagine God as a sleek muscled domesticated warm but somewhat aloof animal?

Firstly God is not tame. He is not ours in the sense that we dominate him or are above him in any way. Spirit and light and life all seem so ethereal and definitely not huggable. Yet basking in the warm and enveloping summer sun does seem intimate yet otherworldly. Immensely powerful and yet personal and close by while being inestimably far away. 
You can imagine being "hugged" by the warmth of the sun but never hugging it back.

I think I've fallen into the trap of saying to God, Please help this person or that person, please save this person or change this situation, without worship. 
There is something inside me that needs to worship, and worship somehow needs to be intimate but other. Completely immersive and enveloping but like being touched by something far, far greater.

If God were too close, would he be cheapened or lessened in some way?

Again this exercise is revealing more about my heart than God's true nature. 
Reading about Jesus, people did want to touch him or be touched by him. But they were content with a touch not of the actual man but simply the hem of his garment. Still Jesus healed countless people and by all accounts many were touched in the process. Even if Jesus had not laid a physical hand on a person, he had thought or said a deeply personal thing to this individual and their bodies responded. They were touched in a way like they had never been touched before. They felt it. They were whole. Movement resulted. Warmth and feeling were possible which had never been before or in a long time. Numbness was replaced by feeling. 
Our souls, when saved, know this same healing, and it is this intimacy of being touched that floods the experience of worship. Harnessing power is what we want to do, but the act of harnessing lessens it by making it controllable. We try to harness the sun or wind for power. We dam rivers and put bits in the mouths of animals so we can control them. But when the wind gusts and blows a gale, we must release the sails and freewheel the windmills because we can't harness a hurricane. You can not begin to tame a tornado. The power of God is greater (hotter) than a billion sun's.

We would be melted to less than a vapour if we were as close as a hundred million light years away from a nanosecond of exposure to his power. We can not be close or we would cease to be. And still he is near to us and more intimate than we could ever imagine. We can not harness God but we can wonder and worship.