Guitar Lessons Made Easy

I was just taking a few moments to practice my guitar lesson for today.  I have been working on the key of D.  The chart at my left shows where my fingers are supposed to go.  My problems begin when I try to strum the chord and make sure my fingers are covering all of the strings all of the time. 

From what I can tell so far, learning how to play the guitar is going to take a lot of practice, a lot of pain (my fingers are too soft - the guitar strings leave a deep imprint in my fingers - #isthatnormal?), and a lot of patience.  I think having some kind of background in music is helpful, but I  know that there is a lot of work yet to do.

Now of course I can make a comparison to learning how to play the guitar to how we walk in our faith (#youcouldseethatcoming).  Allow me to take some of the key things I've learned about what it takes to play the guitar and apply it to how I can grow in my faith.  First of all, there is the obvious: it takes practice.  Like learning anything, we need to find ways to become better at what we do and one way to do that is to practice.  Certainly in faith we can see that practicing faith helps us keep our focus and the more we do it, the better we become at it.

Secondly, we need to be able to listen to hear what we are playing.  Listening can be a lost art in this day and age.  If we desire to grow our faith, somewhere along the line we are going to have to learn to listen to someone or something to help us learn.

Thirdly, we need to pace ourselves.  In playing the guitar, learning a new key or a new song isn't going to happen very easily if we start off with the speed of the original song.  We may need to slow ourselves down and work toward getting faster.  In faith learning, we can sometimes get ahead of ourselves and things can only get messier for us.  Go at a pace that works for you and trust that God will keep us in the race.

Just a few things that I've learned while learning to play the guitar.  I've got a long way to go...