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The Anchor In The Fog

Title: The Anchor In The Fog Scripture: “Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.” (1 John 3:18) By Harold Mawela, Akasia, Pretoria There is a particular kind of fog that rolls in over the Hennops River valley just before dawn. It blankets the highway, swallowing the taillights of the cars crawling home to Soshanguve, to Mabopane, to Wonderpark. You cannot drive through that fog by feeling your way. You cannot close your eyes and hope the tarmac knows your name. You drive by the anchor—the white line painted on the road. You trust the line, even when you cannot see the destination. This is the geometry of love. And we have forgotten the mathematics of it. Let us define our terms clearly, lest we build a house on the marsh of sentiment. The world, in its dizzying wisdom, has sold us a lie wrapped in rose petals and backed by a string orchestra. It tells us that love is a feeling. It tells us that love is the flutter in the chest, the heat in the...
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You Are Not Bread

You Are Not Bread: The Grace of Being Versus The Grind of Doing Akasia, Pretoria — The Morning the Spar Queue Became My Pulpit Brothers and sisters, let me tell you about last Thursday. There I was, standing in the interminable queue at the Karenpark Spar—that peculiar South African purgatory where time goes to die between the checkouts and the braai pack section. The woman ahead of me, designer handbag gleaming like fool's gold, was on her Bluetooth earpiece, voice dripping with the particular anxiety of Pretoria's aspirational class. "No, no, no—tell him I need the tender documents by three! If we don't secure this contract, the board will think I'm failing. I must deliver. I must prove myself. I must..." Her voice faded, but the word hung in the air like municipal smog over the Highveld. Must. Must. Must. I wanted to tap her shoulder. I wanted to whisper what Jesus thundered to the bread-crazed crowd by Galilee: “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for m...
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The Mirror They Carry

The Mirror They Carry: Why Your Light Exposes Their Darkness The lights went out suddenly. Again. Eskom se dinges, we muttered in the dark of our Akasia home, the familiar frustration rising. My phone screen glowed, a tiny square of light in the swallowed room. Scrolling, I saw not updates, but accusations. A pastor denounced for prosperity. A public figure torn apart for an old tweet. A neighbour’s WhatsApp group alight with venom over a boundary wall. In that load-shedding blackout, I saw a deeper darkness: our furious human habit of projecting our own inner chaos onto the nearest available screen—another person’s life. They hated Joseph because of his dream. Read it slowly: “They hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said.” The offence was not his action, but his vision. His clarity became their indictment. His light did not create their darkness; it revealed it. And what is revealed, is often reviled. Here is the practical, paradoxical law you must etch on you...
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The Divine Subpoena on Your Struggle

Title: The Unseen Architect: Why Your Greatest Frustration is the Blueprint of Your Destiny Scripture: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” (Ephesians 2:10) Let me tell you a story. Just last week, I was sitting in my study in Akasia, the Pretoria skyline a distant haze, scrolling through news that felt like a spiritual weight. Load-shedding schedules flickered on my screen alongside headlines of political noise and economic anxiety. My own heart, however, was heavy with a quieter tension—a project I’d felt God place in my spirit seemed stalled, blocked at every turn by lack, by doubt, by sheer logistical impossibility. It felt like trying to build a cathedral with a teaspoon. I sighed, a sound drowned out by the familiar hum of my inverter kicking in. And in that mundane, frustrating moment, the Spirit whispered a truth so profound it rearranged my perspective: Your frustration is not a sign o...
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Your New Beginning is Not a Wish

Title: The Water You Carry: When Yesterday’s Well Runs Dry. Let us share the shade of this old baobab. The sun is new, yet I see you carry the dust of yesterday’s long road on your shoulders. I hear a familiar sigh in your spirit—the sigh of one who has drawn from a well only to find it silted with the sand of old struggles, cyclical fatigue, and frustrations that echo like a broken drum. The scripture whispers a truth our ancestors knew in their bones: “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” But how do we perceive the new stream when our eyes are fixed on the cracked earth of the old season? I. The Three Layers of Fatigue: Soil, Seed, and Sky There is a tiredness that sits in the muscles. There is a tiredness that settles in the mind. And there is a tiredness that seeps into the spirit, convincing you that the map you hold is the only territory that exists. This is the trinity of exhaustion: the pers...
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The Stillness Where Direction Is Found

My friends, my family, children of the great southern soil. This is Harold Mawela, greeting you from Akasia as the morning sun warms the red earth. Today, we do not seek power in the frantic pace, but in the profound pause. We begin with the ancient anchor, the Word that steadies every soul: “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength.”  Did you hear it? Your strength is not summoned from the strain, but from the stillness. This is not a soft suggestion for the weary; it is a divine law for the warrior. And so, I plant this seed of truth for you today: The most intelligent leadership—for your life, your home, your work—is born not in the noise of knowing, but in the quietness of questioning. You cannot hear the compass of your spirit while marching to the drum of the world's demand. The Parable of the Rushing River and the Reflective Pool Let me tell you a story of two waters. There was a rushing, roaring river, powerful and loud, carving its ...
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The Praise That Precedes Victory

The Prisoner's Praise: How Your Midnight Hymn Becomes a Weapon There’s a sound that shatters chains. It’s not the clang of a hammer or the crack of a whip. It’s a hymn, sung off-key in the dark. It’s the sound of praise that precedes victory. Here in Akasia, as the Highveld summer rains finally ease after weeks of flooding that closed our Kruger National Park and left a nation grieving, I’ve been thinking about prisons. Not just the ones made of concrete and steel that our Correctional Services manage, but the inner ones—the prisons of anxiety, of despair, of waiting for a break that seems perpetually delayed. We’ve all felt the walls close in. Maybe it’s watching the news—another political leader stepping down, another complex land claim filed, another grim road accident statistic. Maybe it’s a personal flood: a diagnosis, a broken relationship, a dream that feels washed away. Your circumstance becomes your cell, and the darkness feels total. But I want to speak a law of the spiri...
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