Failure Isn't Final. Harold Mawela

The Fire of Liberation Where Freedom Begins The jacarandas are dying again outside my Akasia window. Not the trees themselves—those stubborn survivors are still standing, as they have through every Pretoria October for decades—but the purple blossoms are falling, carpeting the pavement in a regal death shroud. It happens every year. They bloom with such audacious, defiant beauty, painting our concrete-gray suburb with the colors of royalty, only to surrender their petals to the first autumn wind. It's a beautiful, brutal, annual reminder: even the most glorious things must fall. I was staring at this purple funeral procession last Tuesday morning, nursing a cup of rooibos and a particularly stubborn grudge. The grudge, you see, was against a man who had wronged me in a business deal. His name doesn't matter. What matters is that I had built him a palace in my mind. Every morning, I'd wake up and walk through its corridors, admiring the tapestries of his offenses, polishing ...

I sat in my study in Akasia, Pretoria, watching the news flicker across my screen. The headlines of 2026 were a familiar chorus: a protest march in Durban demanding action on immigration laws, a nation hitting 300 days without loadshedding, and yet, simmering beneath the surface, a cost-of-living crisis where the price of bread and school fees still kept families awake at night. As a pastor, my phone buzzed with messages from people trapped in these very knots. They spoke of financial pressure, family strain, and a gnawing fear of the future. That's when the Lord whispered a profound paradox to my spirit: "Harold, they are fighting shadows with swords, but their lamp sits unlit behind them." Every problem you face is not a location crisis; it is a revelation deficit. The darkness you are wrestling with is not stronger than the light you have refused to activate. The Wisdom War Within Your Problem Scripture: "Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not; neither decli...

The Peaceful Prisoner: How to Sleep When Your World Is On Fire By Harold Mawela From my study in Akasia, Pretoria, I am writing this on a Tuesday morning that feels like a loud Friday. The air is thick with the hum of generators, a sound we have learned to love, because it means the power is on. We have officially passed three hundred days without the dreaded load shedding, a modern South African miracle. But if you live in Akasia, or Roodepoort where an explosion recently plunged thousands into darkness, you know the truth: the lights may be on, but the grid is still groaning. Our peace, like the power supply, feels temporary, a fragile thing borrowed against the next fault. And yet, this morning, I am not thinking about the power grid. I am thinking about a different kind of prison, and a man who slept through his own execution date. I am thinking about Peter. The Paradox of Peter's Peace The Scripture is stark and beautiful in its brevity: “The night before Herod was to bring hi...

It was the kind of Tuesday afternoon in Akasia that makes you question all your life choices. The power had just clicked off—load reduction, Eskom called it, though for our home in Pretoria North, the distinction between a planned outage and a crisis was purely academic. My laptop battery was gasping its last digital breath, the kids’ homework was vanishing into the gloom, and a familiar, simmering frustration began to bubble in my chest. In the middle of my grumbling, my neighbor, Gogo Mthembu, a woman whose faith is as solid as the Magaliesberg mountains, called over the fence. “Ah, Harold,” she chuckled, her voice a warm beacon in the deepening dusk. “Don’t you see? The darkness just makes His light in us shine brighter. The Sanhedrin met in fancy rooms, but we meet here, in the shadows. It is the perfect place for His power to be made perfect.” Her words, simple and profound, landed like a perfectly placed stone, sending ripples through my self-pity. She was right. I had been so fo...

The Name That Breaks the Back of Paralysis Scripture: "Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk." — Acts 3:6 Part One: The Man at the Beautiful Gate Let me take you to a place you know very well—a gate. Not just any gate, but the Beautiful Gate of the temple in Jerusalem. Imagine, if you will, a man sprawled on a mat so worn that the fibres whisper the story of forty years of waiting. Forty years of being carried. Forty years of being laid down. Forty years of watching sandals shuffle past—priests in their fine linen, merchants counting coins, women bearing sacrifices. He asked for silver. He asked for gold. He had trained his tongue to beg before he could walk. Every morning, someone carried him up that steep path to the temple. Every evening, someone carried him back to a dark room where the only sound was his own breathing and the rats scrambling for scraps. But here is the paradox that will either liberate ...

From Denier to Declarer By Harold Mawela (Akasia, Pretoria) Part I: The Man Who Crumbled I still remember the morning. It was 1998—barely a month after my salvation. The sun was painting the Union Buildings gold as I walked to my aunt’s house in Soshanguve. My heart was full of Scripture. I had memorised John 3:16 in three languages. I had prayed for an hour before sunrise. I was ready to conquer hell with a hymnbook. Then my cousin Thabo walked in. He was drunk. His eyes were the colour of regret. He laughed at my Bible. He mocked my prayer language. He called me a "holier-than-thou sellout." And I crumbled. I didn't preach. I didn't pray. I didn't even open my mouth. I laughed along. I denied my King before I had even learned to pronounce His name properly. I was Peter before the rooster crowed—except my rooster was a 1.5-litre bottle of Black Label. That memory haunted me for years. Every time I stood to preach in Akasia, that morning whispered, “You’re a fraud...