Really ideal?

I've been thinking a bit about Idealism - the tendancy which we all have to a certain extent to pursue and measure our experiences by an invisible standard. I am a self confessed idealist, I have high standards and I expect reality to measure up. Over the years I've learnt that human idealism if left to its own devices can run riot causing me to neglect or devalue the real blessings in my life.

Recently I've come back to the notion of idealism with a slightly different tack - what is God's ideal? Taking into account the fact that something real and actual, however small, is already of more worth than something fictional or fantastical, maybe in considering what God might hold as his ideal we should look a little closer to home.

Ephesians 3:20 says that God is able to to 'more than we could ever ask or imagine' but the story of the Bible is that God does all that through 'his power that is at work within us'. The Christian life is this crazy combination of impossibility and actuality; that God's ideal might be the gritty reality of human life with him, with all its mess, issues and transformations. Maybe its true to say that God's ideal is at the same time totally mundane and more than we could ask and imagine; the reality of his work in our lives looking a bit messy and risky to us yet achieving a 'weight of glory' which we will only fully appreciate when all things are made new.