Anyone who has ever played guitar will tell you that there is a very painful process that all guitarists must experience on their way to becoming the “NEXT BIG THING.” When you first pick up a guitar, be it electric or acoustic, following your first few times playing your fingers will hurt and be painful to the touch. There are a couple of solutions that can be tried in order to help the struggling student survive the pain.
First, you can apply Apple Cider Vinegar to the tips of your fingers both before and after playing. When trying this method, you might also want to ice your hand for a few minutes along with the vinegar. Secondly, you can adjust the action on the strings of your guitar. The action on a guitar is the distance between the frit board of the guitar, and the strings. If the action is set too high, it will make the guitar harder to play. Finally, coat the tips of your fingers with clear finger nail polish. It offers enough protection to allow the player to still move around the strings with ease, and yet avoid the pain which have stopped so many through the years.
However, the best advice for a burgeoning guitarist is to play through the pain. You see, the more you play, you begin to develop callouses on the tips of your index, middle, ring, and pinky fingers. These callouses form a hard protective layer of skin over the fingers which you use to play, and this allows you to play longer and longer.
With guitar, callouses are a good thing, but when the conversation turns to the heart of the child of God, far too many of us have formed callouses where they shouldn’t be. Nehemiah 2:17, reads: “Then said I unto them, Ye see the distress that we are in, how Jerusalem lieth waste, and the gates thereof are burned with fire: come, and let us build up the wall of Jerusalem, that we be no more a reproach.”
By the time that this speech is made by Nehemiah to the children of Israel, the walls around Jerusalem have been gone for 125 years. In fact, the remnants of the nation which God had chosen as His own have been living in the rubble heap for some 10 years at this time; they’ve seen the destruction that is Jerusalem. So, why then does Nehemiah bring up the devastation that is obvious? He does it for a very simple reason: the broken walls, the burned gates, the devastated city was normal, and had formed a callous over their hearts. Therefore, before the rebuilding could take place, Nehemiah had to break through the protective coating on the hearts of the Israelites.
How many of us have become calloused to sin? We see God’s Word being violated, burned, misapplied and twisted each day, yet we just say that this is the way of the world. Folks, that is your calloused heart speaking. As children of the living God, we need to break through the hard coating that is over our hearts, and stand against the “wiles of the devil.” (Ephesians 6: 11) We should remove the politically correct tag that so many of us have placed upon our chest as a badge of shame, and go to war against the darkness which threatens our families, country, world, and even our Father’s house. (1 Timothy 3: 15, Numbers 32: 6)
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