The Christmas Guitar In 2010, I began volunteering my services at an addiction recovery program for men. The program required that these men spend one year away from all their addictive influences at a halfway house in Huntsville, Alabama. Every Monday night, I loaded my guitar and Bible into my truck and made the forty-mile drive to the halfway house. Each night I visited, I would conduct a Bible study with the men and encourage them in their journey to sobriety. Before each Bible study, I’d lead the men in a time of inspirational singing as I played my guitar. As the years went by, several of the men at the halfway house took a special interest in my guitar playing. Several of them told me of their desire to learn how to play the guitar. In 2014, there was one particular young man in the program who came up to me and asked, “When are you going to teach me how to play?” At first, I thought he was just making “small talk” with me, so
I didn’t give it much thought. But, as the months progressed, he continued to plead with me to teach him. So, when I saw that he was truly sincere about learning to play, I agreed to teach him a little bit each week after the Bible study was over. Now, the biggest obstacle to teaching him how to play the guitar was that he didn’t have a guitar of his own. So, I had to teach him on my guitar. It’s sort of difficult to show another person how to play a guitar if there aren’t two guitars in the room. I’d show him how to make a chord on my guitar, then hand the guitar to him, and he’d try to hold his fingers on the frets as I had shown him, but he’d forget the placement. So, I’d have to take the guitar back from him and show him again. We’d go back and forth like that frequently, so we didn’t get much accomplished since I only had a few minutes to teach him during each visit. Well, one Monday night, just a little over a week before Christmas, the young man asked me to show him some more chord progressions on my guitar. I looked at him and said, “We’re gonna have to get you a guitar for these guitar lessons to be effective!” I told him that I’d be
Since it was so close to Christmas, all of their used guitars were sold out. I was about to walk out of the store, but something inside me told me to inquire further. December 2021
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