Amanda’s cell phone is four years old. It is an old monochrome Nokia from before the days of flip phones, and it works better than any phone I have ever seen.

Despite its age, it holds a battery charge for a week, and gets reception in places you wouldn’t believe. It has been dropped a few times, but you couldn’t tell from looking at it. It has never caused her a problem.

Meanwhile, Joel is on his third RAZR in six months. Look at how far cellular technology has progressed in the last few years: We now have hand-held phones that play music, take pictures, and fall apart if you shake them too hard.

How quickly we abandon quality for convenience. It’s not hard to see in our culture. Even though the food at McDonald’s or Taco Bell is a nutritional nightmare, it’s fast and cheap; low-quality and overpriced digital downloads have replaced the crystal clarity of CD audio; wireless technology is dominant, even though it is unreliable and slow compared to wired alternatives.

It has permeated every aspect of our culture – technology, environmentalism, art, relationships, and perhaps more inconspicuously, religion.

Because when it comes down to it, Jesus is inconvenient. He is impractical. He always seems to get in the way of my affairs, reminding me that the harder road is usually the right one, or telling me that I am not worthy of Him if I love anything else more than Him.

Jesus is inconvenient, and so those who do not have Him do not want Him, and those of us who do have Him are usually guilty (to varying extents) of trading the real Jesus for an innocuous, manufactured version of Himself. We do this by taking certain of His sayings seriously while ignoring others that do not fit into our already-established lifestyle. Make him white; make him handsome; make him political; make him tolerant. This plastic jesus is convenient because he agrees with us, but he is fragile and easily broken.

The thing about Jesus – the inconvenient, real Jesus – is that He is forgiving. No matter how many times I exchange the truth of God for the lie that I can find happiness in anything but Christ, I am still His missing son. He lovingly awaits my return, and when I do find my way back into His arms, He throws a celebration party.

This is the Jesus I will always come back to.