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The Creative Power of Your Words

The Prophetic Grammar of Your Life: How Your Words Decode Your Destiny A strange silence descends upon our street in Akasia. The familiar hum of appliances ceases. The lights flicker and die. It’s load-shedding again—a South African ritual as predictable as the summer thunder over Pretoria. In the sudden quiet, I hear my neighbour’s voice through the wall: “Ag, man. This country is falling apart. Nothing ever works. We are doomed to darkness.” His words hang in the still, dark air. They are not just a complaint; they are a prophecy. And I wonder, sitting there in the tangible blackness, how much of the darkness we endure is not from Eskom’s failing grid, but from the failing power station of our own mouths? We live in a society shouting itself into chaos, from the violent headlines on News24 to the toxic streams on social media, and then we wonder why our world feels so fractured. The ancient proverb declares with startling simplicity: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (P...
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The Reality of Spiritual Warfare

The Battle for Your Mind: A Defence Against the Spiritual Anesthesia of Our Age A Personal Dispatch from the Front Lines in Akasia Early this morning, before the Pretoria sun had burned through the Highveld haze, I did what I do every day: I put on the armour. Not the ceremonial garb of a theologian, but the practical, scarred gear of a soldier in a war most have forgotten we are fighting. I stood in my small study in Akasia, looking north towards the Magaliesberg, and I declared war. My first conscious thought was not a wish for a good day, but an act of strategic defiance against an enemy whose primary tactic is to make you believe he does not exist. This, I have learned, is the first law of spiritual reality: Your greatest vulnerability is not your acknowledged weakness, but your unrecognized battlefield. Our nation is convulsing with visible wars. We read reports that 957 women were murdered in just three months, a harrowing statistic of a society at war with itself. We see politic...
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The Law of the Open Hand

The Law of the Open Hand: From Scarcity to Divine Supply in a Clenched-Fist World By Harold Mawela From my study in Akasia, Pretoria, I look out at a nation holding its breath. We live in the perpetual tension between promise and provision, between what is pledged from podiums and what is present in our pantries. The headlines scream of crises competing for our fragmented attention, while our hearts whisper the ancient, agonizing question: “Will there be enough?” In this climate, a primal instinct takes hold: the clench. We clench our fists around our finances, our futures, our fragile sense of security. Yet, I come to you today with a counter-intuitive, kingdom truth, a law as immutable as gravity but activated by faith: The Law of the Open Hand. The Parable of the Tightened Fist: A Story from Soshanguve Let me tell you a story. Not from a dusty theological text, but from the sun-baked streets of Soshanguve. I visited a community kitchen run by a widow, Gogo Mthembu. Her pension was a...
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Choosing Faith in the Face of Fear

 Title: The Storm is Not Your Stop; It is Your Signal Scripture: “For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” (2 Timothy 1:7, ESV) My knuckles were white on the steering wheel, a stark contrast against the Johannesburg twilight bleeding into a bruised, angry purple. The rain wasn’t falling; it was attacking, a horizontal siege against my windscreen. My wipers, those frantic metronomes of panic, were losing the battle. On the N1, traffic had solidified into a terrified, glittering necklace of brake lights. Every social media alert on my phone buzzed with the same dread: “Major collision ahead,” “Flash flooding in Pretoria,” “Avoid all highways.” The common sense of my age, amplified by a thousand voices online, screamed one thing: Stop. Find an offramp. Wait it out. But I had a sick child at home in Akasia, and a promise I’d made: “Daddy will be there.” Beloved, let me define our terms clearly. What we call fear is most often not a holy caution, but...
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Embracing Your Divine Authenticity

The Curator of Souls: Why Your True Heritage is the Only Exhibit Heaven Recognizes Let me tell you about a conversation I overheard last week, right here in Pretoria. Two young entrepreneurs were excitedly discussing the new Africa-Europe heritage tourism project. They spoke of turning our sacred sites—places like the ǂKhomani Cultural Landscape—into “experiences,” of “curating narratives” for a global audience. Their eyes shone with the promise of opportunity, and part of me rejoiced. Yet, a deeper, prophetic disquiet settled in my spirit. For in our fervor to package our cultural heritage for the world, we are in grave danger of mastering a skill that is destroying our souls: the art of the curated life. We are all becoming curators. We meticulously arrange the exhibits of our public persona—the successes on social media, the virtuous opinions on geopolitics, the performative piety on Sunday. We present a polished, themed exhibition called “My Life,” while the backrooms of our hearts...
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The Weight That Forges Wings

 The Anvil of the Almighty: Where Purpose is Forged in Pressure By Harold Mawela | Akasia, Pretoria | 28 January 2026 There’s a sound that defines our season here in Akasia, in the shadow of the Magaliesberg. It’s not the summer rain on the tin roofs, nor the birds at dawn. It’s the sound of construction. Every morning, the relentless percussion of hammers and the growl of cement mixers from the new full-title developments in Amandasig echo through the streets. To some, it’s a noise nuisance. To me, sitting on my porch with my Bible and my thoughts, it’s a symphony of divine metaphor. They are building homes from the ground up. But God, I have learned, often builds our destinies from the rubble down. He does not commence with the rooftop pool or the polished floors. He starts with the trench, the deep, painful excavation of the foundation. Before the palace, the pit. Before the promise, the pressure. I know this sound intimately, for it has been the soundtrack to my own spirit. Las...
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The Cage You Carry

The Unlocked Cage: Why Your Greatest Prison is Your Permission A Morning in Akasia, and the Cage I Carried The morning mist still clung to the Magaliesberg when I felt the familiar walls close in. There I was, in my study in Akasia, Pretoria, with a Bible open, a world of promise before me, and yet a silent, desperate narrative played in my mind: “You cannot. The circumstances are too complex. The vision is too vast for someone from here.” I was preaching to thousands about a God of breakthroughs while privately reciting the detailed description of my own locks. I was not in a cage of circumstance, but in a cage of my own consent. The door was unlocked, yet I was an expert in the mechanism of the bolt. This is the silent heresy of the modern believer, especially here in South Africa, where our tangible struggles make such cages feel so justifiable, so real. Our nation itself stands at a crossroads, navigating a world of American isolationism and punitive tariffs, where our hard-won sea...
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