Off-Beat

Have you ever known someone who just has a hard time catching rhythm? Saturdays in Death Valley comes to mind for me because so many people end up off beat during the cadence count. Some say its because of the echo in Death Valley but that’s not the case for everybody.

I say that to say this, when it comes to clapping there are times where people have their hands together when it should be apart and apart when it should be together and it’s hard to catch something when your hands aren’t open to receive it. Clearly, there’s a time for everything like the Bible says.

No matter how much we pray for something to happen, if we don’t position ourselves properly to receive it then we aren’t showing faith that we believe it’ll actually happen. There’s a story about two farmers who prayed for rain, but only one actually went and prepared his field for it and that farmer epitomizes what it means to position oneself.

Now, we pray for a lot of things (SIDENOTE: thank God for unanswered prayers as well) and sometimes we wonder why God doesn’t always come right out and tell us which way we are supposed to go. I meditated on that and I felt like God was telling me because if decisions in life were so cut and dry, then we wouldn’t have to seek Him as earnestly to know which way to go. Proverbs 3:5-6 says to “Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.”

We know that everything works out for God’s will and that God’s timing isn’t necessarily our own so why is it so hard to wait on God to deliver on his promises. It’s because we live in an on-demand generation, and we don’t intend for it to be that way that’s just how society has us moving (i.e. Verizon’s Get It Now, Comcast On Demand, etc). But rather than training ourselves to the rhythm around us (the flow of the world that ultimately leads to death, see Proverbs 14:12,) we should snap to His rhythm by spending time with Him. Just like a quarterback and receiver become in sync because of the amount of time they train together, we should spend time with God so we can be in sync with Him and HIS TIMING!

Swerve!

Just a thought…

I find it interesting that when I’m driving, I tend to swerve the most when my car is in cruise control because I am more relaxed than when my foot is on the gas…and the same can be said for someone (myself include) in their walk with Christ. We have that tendency to ease our foot off of the gas whenever we feel things are going smooth and we get relaxed and COMPLACENT. Next thing you know, we aren’t praying as much, spending as much time with God, etc and ultimately our walk with Christ is becoming staggered and we begin to swerve.

The Bible encourages us by stating: “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.” Hebrews 10:23

We should have a goal everyday to wake up with a renewed passion to follow after Christ…pedal to the metal, full-speed, with everything we got after Him UNSWERVINGLY.

Salute!

With the end of the semester right around the corner, things have slowed a bit but that’s only to catch the second wind before the big kick of exam week. I understand I haven’t kept up this blog to the best of my ability but rest assured that when the summer hits, I’ll be back and better (surely that’s debatable) than ever.

Until then, I did have something on my heart that I wanted to express…and so I shall! Many of the good friendships that I have built over my two years here at Clemson have been with this year’s senior class. I am going to miss them greatly because many have poured in time, wisdom, and encouragement into me during my time here so far that I will never forget.

(A.D.D sidenote tangent) At some point, I’m going to add a page designed solely for the music I listen to because I’ve gotten a lot of rave reviews apparently (thanks MOM!!!) I say that to say this, one of my favorite artists is Eshon Burgundy and he collaborated with Mark Arthur and R-Swift recently to put out this banger called Salute, that I’m dedicating to everybody in the Body but more notably the senior class at Clemson.

All of my soldiers, I salute you today…I pray that everyday you would bear the Armor of God and continue to fight the good fight. Daily press on to God’s calling on your life and continue to be a light in this cold, dark world. I pray that you would not become a product of your enviroments you go into but rather, your environment would become a product of what God is doing in you and through you. You have been equipped for such a time as this and understand that no matter what life throws at you, or how bad things may seem…understand that you are NOT ALONE! You’ve got at least one brother who will be there on your behalf…

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” -John 16:33

I want to be able to pray for each of you individually so if there is anything specific I can pray for you about (or do for you), you can leave me a comment below or email me at bnarcis@g.clemson.edu…otherwise I pray that our paths cross soon and that you stand firm on the ROCK because R-Swift put it best:

Can’t quench the fire this man is on
KNOWING THEY CAN’T ROCK THE ROCK THAT I’M STANDING ON

Salute,
Bryan “B-Nice” Narcisse

Fill Me Up

It’s funny to think how subconsciously we fill our bodies up with things that we are going to regret later. For instance, anybody that knows me knows that I probably had the worst eating habits possible in high school. My pre-game meal for basketball and track was 2 plain McChickens, a large fry, and a medium chocolate shake from the McDonalds up the street from our high school (…and truth be told, you probably just threw up a little bit in your mouth). It’s crazy to imagine but I was actually good after eating that; the only time I’ve ever had stomach problems in a game was when we played Lower Richland my senior year and the line for McDonald’s was rediculously long and I ended up having to play on a Snickers bar. Needless to say we got trashed that game but not because I was the team but generally, whether I scored a good portion of the points or not, I set the tone for my team usually by hustling and I was not nourished to the point where I could fulfill my role.

Well when you consider what the Bible says about how we should fill and nourish our body, a few verses come to my mind. The first one is Ephesians 5:18 which says “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.” In a literal sense you could take this verse to mean ‘Don’t Get Drunk’ but I see the illustration of wine as anything that we use and/or overuse and it occupies most of our time. And by no means am I going to say that I do this day in and day out, I am not perfect but I strive to make this a reality. Anyone who knows me I put a lot of worth in my iPod touch (and especially my Words With Friends App [Challenge me at bnice21 if you want to get beat...err I mean want to play]). We tend to spend most of our down time around areas of our life that we are most passionate about (i.e. video games, building relationships, listening to music).

The Bible says that “For out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.” -Matthew 12:34b, emphasizing that what goes into our bodies will eventually come out, (without getting into the whole digestive discussion, this should be a common sense concept) which means we must be conscious of what we fill our bodies with. What comes out of our body is a direct consequence of something that has been placed in our bodies.

I eventually paid the price for my poor eating habits in high school as I came into Clemson, skinny but with some excess body fat that I’m still shedding off. I feel like the change in nutrition has made a minimal improvement in my performance but you can see a clear difference between me now and what I looked like first coming into Clemson. Sow good habits, and generally you’ll reap good consequences. That’s not to say that everything is going to be good but we will harvest everything we sow because we overflow from our hearts and our actions.

James 3 says that ⁹With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men, who have been made in God’s likeness. ¹⁰Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers, this should not be. ¹¹Can both fresh water and salt^[a] water flow from the same spring? ¹²My brothers, can a fig tree bear olives, or a grapevine bear figs? Neither can a salt spring produce fresh water.”

So I guess the question is: Is your life and your overflow characterized by fresh water or salt water? (because the two can’t co-exist as it says in verses 11 and 12)

Parkour-Like Faith

So my buddy, Kit, showed me this pretty sick parkour video and watching it really made me think (other than how insanely athletic you have to be to do it) what kind of faith you have to have to try some of these moves and how that applies to our lives as followers of Christ.

Wikipedia defines parkour as the physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle within one’s path by adapting one’s movements to the environment. In other words, a normal person would see an obstacle and possibly complain about it, whereas a traceur (one who does parkour) is glad for the opportunity to be able to transcend this particular obstacle. See many Christians know Philippians 4:13 but few are willing to actually trust God on that truth. Dale Sellers, a local pastor, puts it in the form of a challenge. He says “What would you be willing to attempt for God if you knew you could not fail,” and I know for me personally there are a lot of things but I am either left saying not right now OR surely not me (another post for another time). If you are a follower of Christ and He lives inside your heart, then he has equipped you and me to overcome any obstacle that comes in our path and use it to leverage the advancement of His kingdom.

We may not see it now, but we’ve got to hold on and keep the faith that we have been perfectly hand-crafted for a time such as this. We have been placed with the people we interact with regularly for a reason.  For instance, we are going to have obstacles such as brick walls in our lives but a parkour-like faith will give us the ability to look at our situation with eagerness because we know we’ll be able to transcend to a higher level than before.

Also, in fairness to the tracers, they did not wake up one day and say I’m going to do back flips off of a moving car; it took practice, encouragement, help from more experienced people so they could grow into more experienced and well-seasoned tracers. The same should apply to our walk as Christ-followers, we should have people encouraging us to preserve so we can overcome our obstacles and learn from them so we can later encourage the next generation.

One more thing, BY NO MEANS IS THIS NORMAL…but since when are we as followers of Christ supposed to be normal. It’s pretty hard to be natural when you have something SUPERNATURAL in you, remember that. The world will come to walls that they will just stare at aimlessly, maybe even question why the wall is even there and while they are doing that, we are long past it and on to the next one!

I’ll leave you with what I now have coined as the ‘parkour verse’:  “with my God I can scale a wall. As for God, his way is perfect; the word of the LORD is flawless. He is a shield for all who take refuge in him.” 2 Samuel 22:30b-31

Psycho!

I am one that can be described as a true hip-hop head. I love underground hip-hop music and independent artists because I feel that they have more of a focus on lyricism. So with that said, I have recently found a new music group to watch in 2010 and it’s Gallery Drive coming straight from the West Coast. This is their recent single and the topic of this blog…check out the video before you continue:

The word psycho makes me think of two different categories, the first one is someone who is weird and I say that has it’s own category by itself because that means that you are not like everyone else. In other words the things that the world is doing, we as Christ followers are not doing that. Proverbs 14:12 says “There is a way that seems right to a man,
but in the end it leads to death,” so to be honest I don’t plan on compromising anything I believe in to please anybody because in the words of the great Bible-scholar, DJ Khaled, “I don’t care what nobody say, IMA BE ME (BE ME)” and if that makes me weird then so be it.

The other word that I think of is the word, freak, and whenever I think of that, the thought of something just being off the charts comes to mind. For instance, expressions like: crazy good, sneaker freak, insanely delicious would fall into this category. Essentially, it’s like saying to do too much or have too much of one thing that people find that strange.

The lyrics in the chorus start by saying: “Yo I’m psycho, verses that you heard this is psycho, Gallery Drive got the right flow…” as if they’re saying that yes, we have God in our lyrics so some people may say that these lyrics are psycho. In fact, I feel that this song has a similar theme to that of the DC Talk throwback, Jesus Freak.

So I say all of that to say this, 2010 is coming up and I plan to raise my level of passion in everything from my play on the basketball court to my daily walk in faith as well, in ways that could rub some people the wrong way and just for the record, I’m ok with that (my intention is not to offend ANYBODY for sheer blatent ignorance.)  However, I know exactly who I’m living for and what fuels me so at this point allow me to quote Gallery Drive and say “TELL ME I’M A PSYCHO!”

Pop it Off (part 4)

So if you have been reading my blog then you know that I’ve been doing a series called “Pop-it-Off” and I realize I never expounded on what it means to pop something off. Well, when I was in high school and there were two people who had “problems,” most of the time it would be all talk but occasionally you would have that one person that loved to boost stuff up. They would say something along the lines of “I bet you won’t hit him…” and usually at that point a decision is made to either squash it for the time being or “pop it off.” Whenever something was popping off, everyone knew. You could not hide something that big, once it got started, which was always funny to see them try to do as soon as an administrator would come along to break it up.

So I say all of that to say this…I have officially been alive for 19 years and a couple days and looking back, I think it’s safe to say that I grew the most (physically and spiritually) during this past year (my 18th year). I formed bonds and relationships that have stretched my faith and given me a new perspective on life. They challenge me regularly and do not allow me to settle for being average and that’s another key thing that this past year has taught me is how I can improve because many of my closest friends are the ones who shoot me straight no matter what and I can respect that, no matter how hard it may be to swallow. They watch my blind spots and I really appreciate it but I appreciate it more when they hold me accountable to doing what I said I would do.

I have a really good friend named Justin, who has this saying that he uses a lot whenever I’m talking about what I’ve got to do and he says to just “Do the Dang Thang!” See, it’s so easy to get complacent once you reached certain points in your life and then even recognize that you have not done what you could but to never act on it is just as bad as not recognizing it in the first place.

Touching back to the earlier posts in the series, it’s about decisions not intensions (part 1). James 2:26 says, “As the body without the spirit is , so faith without deeds is .” Keeping in mind that if it were easy then everyone would reach their full potential, and sadly that doesn’t happen because it takes sacrifice (part 2) on a daily basis (part 3). So I want to encourage everybody to remember who’s in our corner, tell your situation “Have you seen how big my Lord is?” If it’s still bothering you, then it’s time to pop it off…oh and SPOILER ALERT, WE WIN…EVERYTIME!!!

Pop it Off (part 3)

Ok, so I know that I ended part 2 like two weeks ago even though I said that I was going to continue it “tomorrow” you got to realize that I operate heavily on CST (and no it’s not Central Standard Time, it’s College Student Time) which means time is fairly relative in many cases. In any event, I’m back and talking about trusting God with everything. I came across this video from a good friend of mine, Mario, who has a ministry out in Tennessee called Arise and this was one of their recent promo videos

It’s interesting what it says how we as Christians tend to sing lies because we live lives that contradict what we are singing. My friend, Tyler, made a blog post referencing one of Hillsong United’s songs “With Everything” and he made a great point because any time the lyrics make mention to words such as EVERYTHING, ALL, or NEVER, we should stop and realize the weight that holds.

For instance, let’s take for example Luke 9:23…it says, “Then he said to them all: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross DAILY and follow me.” Now being the slightly uneducated guy that I am, I had to get further clarification on the meaning of the word daily so I googled the definition and come to find out this is what came up: every day; without missing a day. So if you were to replace the word daily with a similar word, I’m willing to bet that these words/phrases would not be considered synonyms: occasionally, whenever it seems convenient or I feel like it, on the first and the third, only on Sundays, only if around a majority full of Christians, for a couple days after a Christian camp or conference, and so on but you get the idea (and btw I myself have experienced most of these and I would not want you to fall into the same trap that I did so don’t think that I am just nit-picking certain things.)

Once it really hit me that being a Christian was an everyday thing  and that it means passionately following Him on a daily basis, was when I began to see my faith begin to grow. I began to get a sort of confidence about my walk, some would even call it a swagger (Christ Swag…if you’ve heard that Prince Among Theives mixtape then you know what I’m talking bout.) The final part of this series will come tomorrow SOON!!!

Pop it Off (part 2)

(cont.) My friend, Matt recently had a blog post talking about sacrifice and when you get a chance, you should really check it out because I love his take on the subject of sacrifice but I’m going to touch on it briefly. When we decide to do something rather than intend to do it, there will ALWAYS be  some sort of sacrifice involved. For instance, if I want to get in better shape and I have that decided in my mind then my next step is figuring out what I need to do for that to happen and in the same breath, I have to figure what I must not do. If my goal is to get in better shape then I may want to run at least two miles a day which could mean getting more sleep and not being on facebook as much or eating healthier and drinking more water and sacrificing a love for soft drinks for a greater goal.

See, there are a lot of things that we WANT and a lot of those things are good things but we have got to be able to distinguish something good from something great because to accomplish something great, we may have to sacrifice those things which may be good for us. For me, I think it goes back to how I believe that God did not send his one and only son to hang naked on a cross for us to go out each day and just get by. We are not called to be mediocre nor just to be in the race or to finish the race…WE ARE CALLED TO WIN!!! Going back to the verse from yesterday, it says in verse 24 and 25 that we should “run in such a way as to get the prize. ²⁵Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.”

We are to PRESS ON and aim to win. In the end, the prize would be hearing “Well done, good and faithful servant” from God and best believe that’s going to come with sacrifices of it’s own. To hear that from God would mean we have to be passionately following Christ and be willing to sacrifice. I think about the story of the Rich Young Man and how much stuff he had. He clearly loved Jesus but was not willing to sacrifice it all, maybe some things but since he had so much, he walked away sad because he was not willing to trust him with EVERYTHING (I’m gonna talk about that tomorrow!)

Pop it Off (part 1)

Bonjour, Hola, Aloha, and WHAZZZZZZAP!!! I know it’s been a minute since ya boy has made an update but rest assured, I’m getting back into the swing of this and will surely recap ya’ll on things that’s been going on this summer. I’m home for the week and usually when I’m home, I reflect on things that I’ve done while I was younger and this particular time I was thinking about how I got into rapping. Remembering that it initially came from the fact that I followed in my mom’s footsteps and wrote poetry, one of the first poems I ever wrote flashed into my head and it went something like this:

I was at this race one time and I met this guy
He was predicting how much he would win by
He said as soon as he crosses the finish line
He’ll say that trophy’s as good as mine
The race started but he didn’t move, what’s taking so long
So I walked up to him and asked him what’s wrong
He said all the time I talked about how I would end
I never truly knew how to begin.

I remember that I wrote that one day after church and I’m sure I could not analyze this poem this well back in the day, I’m mean for one, it’s not like this is a true story. But seeing as how school is right around the corner for me and many others out there, I figured I’d tried to fuel your fire for a little bit.

Looking back over this poem and it’s constant theme of a race makes me think of the passage in 1 Corinthians. It says in Chapter 9 that, “²⁴Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. ²⁵Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. ²⁶Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. ²⁷No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.”

At Fuse* we’ve been talking about how life is a Vapor and that we should begin with the end in mind and I believe that wholeheartedly because I instantly think of the old cliche that says “if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.” But B-Coop made a quote that has been convicting me every since he said it and that was “DECISIONS, not intentions” and it didn’t register to may as vital until I looked at the differences in the definitions:

To INTEND something means to direct the mind on (in other words merely, a PLAN of action)
To DECIDE something to make a final choice or judgment about (in other words, the ACT of nailing it down)

Making a parallel, I think about the runner in my poem because I’m sure he had every intention in the world to run the race as hard as he could and then come out victoriously but he didn’t make the decision to actually buckle down and do it. It’s so easy to SAY that we’ll do something because saying something usually doesn’t require much effort but the actually act of doing usually requires not only effort, but SACRIFICE…(I’ll talk about that tomorrow)