Lebron James before 'The Decision'

A preject is a person who has been rejected by one or both parents, and as a result lives with a cracked, broken or shattered soul. To cope with and compensate for the damage visited on his soul by the absence of his father and the inconsistent presence of his mother in his life, LeBron James has mastered one of the first tools of soul protection: silence.

Man, he’s really good at it, too.

So good, in fact, that it has inspired a culture of silence around his free agency from a group of professionals paid to put their thoughts and words in print, and render a verdict. Yup, the basketball writers of America, in spite of all the rhetoric, verbiage, and text spewing from every sports news outlet on the continent, have been curiously silent on some pretty important stuff. Like seasoned prejects, they’ve been throwing up a fence of words that has effectively obscured the truth.

With all of the hoopla and carefully crafted misinformation swirling around Lebron James and the rest of the holy trinity of the 2010 free agent class, the most important and compelling bits of news has been what is not being said:

It’s astonishing how everyone has been silent about Tracy McGrady, a top 10 player just two years ago, on the mend from microfracture surgery, and who at 75% of his former self would still be an appealing running mate for an insouciant superstar who only wants to win. That T-Mac vowed to stay with the Knicks (who still own his yet unrenounced rights) if they managed to sign two max free agents ratchets up the stakes in this surreal game of basketball monolopy being presided over by a stakeholder in Akron and a powerbroker at Penn Plaza. A lineup with James, Stoudemire, a healthier McGrady, and two other nondescript dudes (more on this later) would certainly cause the rest of the league to take notice, and resurrect visions of Boston, 2008. Remember that when the original Post-Modern Big Three were united three summers ago there were whispers about Ray Allen’s ankles (he’d just come off ankle surgery and no one knew how productive he could still be, which is one of the reasons he was made available in a trade), and Paul Pierce’s elbow. Not appreciably different than the recent, in-season chatter about McGrady’s knee and the current yammering about Stoudemire’s health.

It’s astonishing how everyone has been silent about Eddy Curry, a behemoth of a center just two years removed from serious all-star consideration, who is capable of giving a revamped Knick team at least the inside presence of a Luke Longely with the champion Bulls of the 90s or a Zydrunas Ilgauskas, and later a weakened Shaq, with an underachieving Cavalier squad. It’s easy to suspect that there was more to that sit down between Lebron and Curry in Ohio this past May (reported by the NY Daily News on May 18th, but curiously taken down from the website today) than just shooting the breeze about Curry’s future. If this meeting was indeed initiated by James it smacks more of shrewd investigatory assessment by James than just two ballers hanging out. With no history to speak of (other than sharing the same agent), the James-Curry pow wow was as odd and incongruous a spectacle as Russian spies meeting with White House aids in the dining hall of the Capital building.

It’s astonishing how everyone has been silent about Mike D’Antoni’s coaching appeal to Lebron James specifically. While Lebron has never blatantly called out his former coach, Mike Brown, for unimaginative offense schema and poor decision-making in big playoff games, anyone who’s played the game or watched it a lot could feel Lebron’s thoughts during the press conferences after deflating, unfathomable losses to teams with lesser talent, but better coaching. It is a player’s game, but James has always been a loyal, obedient soldier who would never show up his coach. He is the consummate warrior committed to executing the game plan given; and in this context, coaching matters. Byron Scott is cool and decorated and all, but James has never seen him coach uptempo, while he has successful history with D’Antoni, even if it was only for three summers of fun on the way to an Olympic gold medal.

It’s astonishing how everyone has been silent about the immediate impact of a potential lineup of Monta Ellis (from a possible sign-and-trade for David Lee, to which the Golden State Warriors are reportedly open), Tracy McGrady, Lebron James, Amar’e Stoudemire, and Eddy Curry, with Wilson Chandler, Bill Walker, Danilo Gallinari, and possibly Mike Miller coming off the bench. Replace James with Miller and that lineup is still formidable, but with James it’s an NBA finals lock.

Boston has shown that three future hall of famers near the end of their careers, one speedy point guard on the way up, and one marginally talented behemoth with a heart as huge as his scowl, can run into battle and slay any Goliath if they have the right inspiration on the sideline to guide them. As astute a student of the game as Lebron claims to be, it would be astonishing if he didn’t see that a projected five of Ellis, McGrady, James, Stoudemire and Curry would send the Big Three into retirement, Beantown into reconstruction, and Doc Rivers back into broadcasting and increased family face time.

Now, I’m not saying Lebron is headed for New York (even if he is scheduled to announce his decision from the Boys & Girls Club in Greenwich, CT, a stone’s throw away from Madison Square Garden). He’s been too preject silent for anyone to take more than an educated guess. All I’m saying is…it’s astonishing what’s not being said.

© 2010, Earl Middleton. All rights reserved.

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Pamela & Joe Bryant at a 2010 Lakers' playoff game

Kobe Bean Bryant is basketball’s equivalent of an assassin. At least 41 times a year, on a well light corner of Figueroa Street in downtown Los Angeles, you can find the self-proclaimed black mamba poised to strike with speed and precision at game’s end, sending visiting teams out of Staples Center snakebitten and twice shy. Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard for Mr. Bryant to get the benefit of the doubt in the national media afforded to his countepart atop the basketball tell, Lebron James. It’s pretty hard to write something nice about a black snake.

But if ever there was a moment when Mr. Bryant deserved our sympathy it was in the shower at the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia a decade ago, holding the repeat NBA championship trophy with tears streaming down in his elfin face. Crying not because of what he’d just won, but because of what he’d lost: his father. No, Joe ‘Jellybean’ Bryant had not passed away, but it sure must have felt like it to Mr. Bryant.

It’s no secret that Mr. Bryant’s parents rejected him, and his timing and choice of a bride, a short ten years ago. Given the nature of humans, as we watched Mr. Bryant’s parents sit courtside for the first time at a Staples Center playoff game against the Oklahoma City Thunder, one had to wonder if full forgiveness and reconciliation had taken place after the infliction of such a deep wound. Bullies don’t like to be bullied, ergo snakes don’t like to be bitten; and in this case the mamba was bitten badly. His parents were no shows at his wedding, his new house, the birth of his first child, and his greatest professional achievement to date, a back-to-back championship practically right down the street from their five bedroom Lower Merion home.

Examining the lives of public figures can be such voodoo science, because there’s often so much withheld from view. But in this case Mr Bryant’s celebrity, and to a lesser extent that of his dad, helped to place in plain view for a global audience a silent, invisible and overlooked problem: prejection. Parental rejection is more common than one might think. And in this case common doesn’t mean less significant. There are some 100 million people battling the problem in the United States, and as many as 1 billion globally.

Whether the courtside playoff photo op was authentic, or just shrewdly engineered ‘branding’ for a rehabbed icon on the corporate endorsement comeback trail may only be known later, through the lives of Mr. Bryant’s daughters, Natalia & Gianna, because children are windows into the spiritual, relational, and emotional dynamic of a household. And what we don’t forgive we pass on. If Mr. Bryant hasn’t fully forgiven, it will be evident in his own rejection of his kids.

We are a society that spends increasingly more of our leisure and entertainment dollars on the escape from and management of pain. Psychic pain. The pain of prejection. And like Grimaldi the clown, who had no one to cheer him up when he was down, to whom do supreme entertainers like Mr. Bryant turn to help manage their pain and nurse their wounds? One can only hope, for the sake of his family, that Mr. Bryant has fully sealed the deal, as befits his legend; that this battle is over, with no chance for overtime.

© 2010, Earl Middleton. All rights reserved.

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Kevin Garnett

If you didn’t know, I’m telling now before it becomes front page news, so you’ll be in the know. Kevin Garnett is a preject.

You say, “What’s a preject?”

A parental reject. Someone who has been rejected by one or both parents, and is living with a cracked, broken, or shattered soul. Kevin Garnett is a preject.

A recent Boston Globe article about Garnett tells of his racially tinged arrest as a high school junior in South Carolina, and its impact on his life today; namely, his inability and/or unwillingness to trust others. His former teammate, Leon Powe, offers that Garnett trusts no one. This is classic preject behavior, although in this case the rejecting parent is the City-Fathers-Complex, the civic power structure, the only father he’d known growing up–the local father institution better known as the city government, which he thought was there to help, protect, and provide for him; but instead, in his experience, hurt, violated and rejected him.

Ouch!

Rejection by parents for who we are (or are not), or what we have done (or wouldn’t or couldn’t do); for our being and/or behavior beyond our control or choice, is both painful and common prejection. This occurs often in counter culture children (boys who are not athletic, girls who are not sweet), homosexual children, and children born with mental and/or physical deficits and challenges. And when you’re 6’11″ and black in in some parts of South Carolina a generation ago, you’re as counter culture and physically challenged as it gets.

The key to overcoming this kind of soul breaking rejection is perspective and perception. Prejection is really not about parental intent, but about child perception. When a child accepts the ‘truth’ offered through a parent’s behavior that s/he is not worthy of love, respect and applause just by virtue of his/her presence on the planet, but is instead faulty and unworthy and deserving of poor treatment, that child lives the rest of his/her life guarding against what s/he fears s/he deserves, and will get from other parental figures in life.

Learning how to open up and trust again is a true sign that healing has begun. And for Kevin Garnett, the doctor is still not in.

© 2010, Earl Middleton. All rights reserved.

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God is obssessed with underdogs. The oppressed, the widow, the orphan. So much so that He defines the true purpose of learning as becoming equipped to defend and deliver His underdogs. Jesus went even further and suggested the underdog, and orphans in particular, are the leading, and perhaps only, class of people in the kingdom of God (Mark 10:14). You might say, “that’s exclusionary!” Well, hate to be the one to break it down to you, man, but the kingdom actually is an exclusive realm. Don’t fret so hard, though, because if the locks on the pearly gates require latchkeys and fatherless children are indeed the only folks who will make it in, the joint may be more populated than most might think.

Check the stats: 30 million American kids are fatherless (don’t have a dad living with them); 85% of all kids exhibiting behavioral disorders are fatherless; 71% of all high school dropouts and 70% of all juveniles in state operated institutions are fatherless; and, according to UNICEF, there are a whopping 208 million fatherless orphans globally. Yo, there are a lot of orphans in our world. And these are just the stats for the under 18 crowd. Fatherlessness is not cured by turning 19. What of the almost one billion around the world who have survived hellish childhoods to become wounded adults? You know what? Because you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you might be one of those. An adult survivor of fatherlessness. An old orphan. A preject.

Gil Scott-Heron wrote and performed with the preject in mind, back in a day when most of America thought a fatherless-orphan-preject was just the sad creature showing up on TV screens with distended belly, brown face, floured lips and more flies on their head than hair. But he defined home in a way only a preject can understand. Home is where the hatred is. And if you can understand it, feel it, then maybe you’re a preject, too. It’s really simple. If you can’t go home, you’re a preject. If you feel pain when you go home, you’re a preject. If it seems like a good idea to never go home again, you’re a preject. If dad is home, but you’re not welcomed and championed, just tolerated, you’re a preject. If you’re 55, white, and never hosted a fly on your head, but when you think of home you think of hurt, you’re a preject.

And, if you’re a preject, I do have some good news for you: God is obssessed with you! He’s set His house up to be a welcoming, championing environment for you. And just when you thought you couldn’t go home, He’s redefined and relocated home for you. Gil, writing from his pain that he tried, unsuccessfully, to chase on a horse, only knew of the home where hatred lived. I knew that home, too. Still do. But I can tell you, from a place of healing, that there is another home, where Father is. Where the door is always open and latchkeys are obsolete. And all it takes to get there is to start the short journey.

Wanna go home? Click here.

© 2010, Earl Middleton. All rights reserved.

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The Prosperity Gospel (and I’m not hating, because I do believe that poverty is a curse Jesus came to destroy) will be more convincing when people other than preachers asking for seed sown into them and their ministries start teaching and proclaiming it. Legit prosperity is not dependent on seed sown into it, but on the seed it sows! Not on getting, but giving. Well, okay, it is dependent on getting one thing. Revelation!

Luke 19:42-44 teaches us that each city/person has specific things assigned to them that produce peace (the Greek word eirene is also accurately translated “prosperity”) for them and can only be accessed by revelation, which enables them to see/know their DAY of visitation (oversight inspection: when God shows up to check you out and see if you qualify for the promotion). We cannot prosper without a day of visitation when we pass muster and graduate to our next level! When we know the day (and we can–by divine revelation), we can prepare for it! If we don’t know the day of our visitation, or the things given to us to cause us to prosper, because we didn’t take the time or go to the trouble to get the revelation, then we will still get our day of visitation, but be unprepared for it and so not qualify for the promotion. Everyone gets their day of visitation! Everyone has things assigned that causes their prosperity. How many people are living today with those things hidden from them, and so are chasing prosperity through another special offering on Christian television? Prejects, because of our spirit deficits (as a result of our soul damage), live woefully short on revelation. So, when we’re rich, we can still be poor. And when we’re poor, we can’t get rich. That was literaly the case with jerusalem in Jesus’ day, and with many in the body of Christ now.

To learn how to get your soul healed so that you can begin to receive the kind of revelation that makes for your prosperity and changes your life, click here.

© 2010, Earl Middleton. All rights reserved.

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Whatchyou say!?

That’s right. I said it, I meant it, and I’m here to represent it! So, i’ma say it again. Rejection is really liberation. It reveals where the source of our nurture ISN’T, helping us to get on with the business of finding where our nurture IS, and freeing us from empty, wasted attempts to get what we need in all the wrong places and from all the wrong people. Rejection really is a course correction that we can and should be grateful for.

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let me explain. I’m convinced that, for those who love God (Romans 8:28), all suffering is redemptive. Although a specific life episode may indeed be bad, when viewed contextually, it works together with everything else in our lives to produce something good. This is so because God is frugal (John 6:12,13). If God refuses to waste a word, watching over every divine utterance until it comes to pass (Jeremiah 1:12); and if Jesus refuses to waste even one  fragment of left over bread after shutting down history’s biggest ever impromptu soup kitchen; then it stands to reason that every painful episode of our lives is put to good use as well.

When I finally came to terms with my parents consistent and unintentional rejection, it both provoked and freed me to seek acceptance in other places. It stirred my active search for a person or place of consistent, unconditional acceptance. It took some years for me to realize that I would not and could not find ultimate acceptance in the embrace of flawed people, structures or ideas; but that realization led me to recognize that full acceptance is available for all of us only in the Beloved, the one who created us for personal relationship and pursues us with passion (Ephesians 1:6).

Leading churches from a largely ignored pulpit for some 20 years has shown me that many people deny the reality of their prejection (parental rejection) and rut down the wrong path to completion because of fear. Fear of losing all connection to a parent who painfully rejects them. Fear of being excoriated by a society that reifies the idea of parent and parenting, but denigrates them both in practice. Fear of trusting an inner voice they’ve been trained to ignore and even rebuke.

I believe completion, maturity, is our goal, our divinely assigned destiny; and only one, unique, narrow path leads to it for each of us (Matthew 7:14). Inquiring at, and finally walking through the Strait Gate of acknowledging & accepting parental rejection is the courageous first step toward that spiritual completion & maturity. A first step that many find almost impossible to make. But for those who got it like that, freedom and destiny awaits. To take that first step, click here.

© 2010, Earl Middleton. All rights reserved.

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That could’ve been me. I’ve had two incidents. There, but for the grace of God, go I. But it wasn’t, and it’s not.

The world considers me to be abused by my Dad: stricken, smitten, & afflicted! And it’s true. My own words confirm it (Is 53:4). My Dad did beat me. But I still love Him. Now, this is not one of those cases psychologists refer to as ‘transference,’ where the abused develops feelings of affection for their abuser. This is all purposeful, and planned. I knew it was coming, and I let it. In fact, I wanted it. I submitted to Dad’s beatings so that I could be the savior, the deliverer, the location and experience changer of prejects everywhere! God bruised me (Is 53:10), & yet I still loved God, because I love you!

Yeah, I’m a healed preject. I was abandoned by my Father in the wilderness and rejected by Him on the cross. But I used the G.R.A.C.E. steps to get healed! The same steps I’ve told this Middleton guy to share with you. When I cried out to Dad, ‘why have you forsaken me?!’ I was actually confronting Him with my pain & releasing it (& Dad). I had to release the pain in order to complete my mission (which required going into hell and preaching there). I did it for you, to show you how to do it and get my results!

I’ve been sitting for over 2,000 years at the right hand of the dude, the Dad who abandoned, smote, struck, afflicted, bruised, and forsook me. Willingly! You have to be whole inside, and walk in love and total, perfect understanding to do that! Without that kind of love, the godhead, my first family, would definitely be dysfunctional, crippled by major issues! But we’re not. We’re whole, and highly functional, and modeling the definition of family for you, because I understood that even in the rejection, my Father loved me; so I was able to return love instead of rejection! Could you imagine what would’ve happened to the world if I did what most prejects do: reject back? Could you imagine if I would’ve refused to go back to heaven and be in the same throne room as my Dad until He apologized to me, and explained why He beat me, and promised to never do it again, and made up for it by giving me something expensive? Whatever you’ve imagined, it didn’t happen because I knew and believed in my Father’s love even (in fact, especially) in my time of parental rejection, and I never let that ‘faith’ go!

Your dad may have beaten you. But if you can love him in spite of it by learning from me, you will break through that inner ceiling that’s been holding you back. If you want me to show you how, click here. It all starts with trusting me as your model and decision-maker. The rest will be history and victory!

All the best,

Jesus Christ

© 2010, Earl Middleton. All rights reserved.

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You’re probably asking yourself right now, “what the heck is a functional preject?” And you probably realize that I’m about to answer. A functional preject is someone who has been rejected by one or both parents, yet still seems to be in control of his/her life and in no need of being ‘taken up!’ (Psalm 27:10) Sort of like an alcoholic or drug abuser who still functions at work or home. You see, it took death, close to home death, to get me thinking about Jesus’ experience with parental rejection.

Death is a lot like being in a wilderness. Or maybe it’s the other way around. But you get my point. It’s all about loss. Things (and people) are supposed to die in wildernesses. And like everything else in life, wildernesses have stages. The ending of the whole experience is also its deepest, lowest point, where you feel completely separated from God, seemingly unable to reach Him or hear His voice. That’s when you have to depend on His word & the memory of His love. And that’s what happened to Jesus both in the beginning and ending wildernesses of his ministry (the trial in the desert after his baptism, and the passion on the cross after his Palm Sunday coronation). In both settings the severity of the separation intensified at the end (forcing him to defend himself with the word at the end of the 40 days of temptation; and leading him to cry out to the Father, ‘why have you forsaken me?!’ just before he gave up the ghost–which is what actually, finally killed him!). 

Jesus was fully human, with feelings just like yours and mine. Given the closeness of His relationship with his heavenly Father up to that time, he must’ve felt abandoned at the beginning of his ministry as he was left all alone to deal with the devil (‘if you are the son of God…’ – a Satanic test of his conviction about his identity & call) and forsaken at the end of it (a Godly test of his willingness to execute the plan, stick to the script and run the play called by the coach even when all seemed lost). Imagine ministering for three years with the thought in the back of your mind, ‘when I really needed Dad, He left me out there all by myself!’ Given the circumstances it would’ve been understable. But did Jesus function throughout his entire ministry feeling rejected by his father? Hardly!

Prejection only becomes limiting and destructive when we allow it to rob us of 1) parental honor,  and 2) identity & purpose! Only God and His word can restore those to us when they go missing via prejection. Jesus, however, never let any possible feelings of abandonment get him to the place of parental dishonor. Nor did he lose his vision of his identity and purpose. In fact, his wilderness experience confirmed and affirmed his sense of self and mission.

How much of your life difficulties are connected to the ‘dishonor’ of mother & father? We’re called to honor them even in and after their death, and when we do the Deuteronomy 5:16 blessing rests upon us. Jesus perfectly demonstrated how to do this, as he honored his Father even after two seasons of wilderness abandonments, and walked on this earth manifesting the blessing, prospering in his ministry. Through the ultimate expression of parental honor he gained eternal life and all power in heaven and on earth.

© 2010, Earl Middleton. All rights reserved.

• Review: Crazy, Stupid, Love I'd heard that this was a good movie from a friend and that both she and her husband liked it, but I thought it might have been maudlin, though the reviews were all good. So I decided to see it last night with my 25 yo daughter. It was truly......
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© 2010, Earl Middleton. All rights reserved.