Convenient Jesus

This past weekend at our annual Real World Retreat we focused on one thing. Music. Kinda.

We took a look at how music has changed in the last 15 years. Not the style of music, but the quality. The music we listen to now has been changed so much to make files smaller that the music is actually distorted and compressed with piece of musical information missing. And there's only one reason why the general population has put up with it. It's more convenient.

The music industry (and other industries have followed suit) have learned that people will sacrifice almost anything for convenience. Make it smaller, lighter, crappier, whatever you need to do to make it more convenient for me. If I really wanted to hear better music I would need to find a stereo system and get some actual physical recordings, but that's really hard to jog with. So instead I'll listen to 2 hours of music, the files shrunk down to fit on my iPod through the horrible little earbuds I got for free with my phone. The quality of the music is horrible, but it's convenient for me to listen to wherever I am, right?

So, the question we led this to was this: How do we shrink down the symphony of Jesus to make Him more convenient for our lives? What are we trading out to have a convenient Jesus? I'll probably have a better quality relationship with Jesus if I take some time to spend alone with Him, reading His Word and talking with Him, but how convenient is that? What if I just listen to the podcast of a sermon while driving and call it a day?

The interesting part of this whole thing to me while researching this was seeing some of the interview of musicians and how they feel about this (I wasn't able to show it at the retreat, just a slight bit of bad language from musicians). It makes me wonder how Jesus feels about it, Him trying His best to have a relationship with the one He loves and getting a "when it's convenient for me" answer.

The real question is when it comes to knowing Jesus Christ, is it about quality or convenience?

T