Failure Isn't Final. Harold Mawela

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Focus Starves Fear

The Fortress of the Fixed Mind A devotional meditation from Akasia, Pretoria The Diagnosis: A Nation Held Hostage by Foreboding I want to tell you about a conversation I had this week at the corner of Daan de Wet Nel Drive and Wonderboom Airport Road. A young man, perhaps twenty-six, sat in his Toyota Etios with the engine running. He wasn't going anywhere. He was simply... waiting. Waiting for what? "Pastor," he said, "I'm waiting for the next terrible thing to happen." He is not alone. We are a nation learning to breathe while bracing for impact. The crime statistics released in August tell us murder has decreased by 5.9%, contact crime by 2.3%. But statistics do not silence the scream in the night. Numbers cannot nurse the wound. And so we live as a people perpetually flinching flinching at the knock on the gate, flinching at the WhatsApp message that begins with "I'm sorry to tell you," flinching at the news alert that another woman's ...

What Grows Underground

What Grows Underground John 12:24 "Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds." The Impatience of the Living I am writing this from my study in Akasia, where the jacarandas have finally shed their purple and the evenings carry that Highveld chill that makes you grateful for a working geyser. But that gratitude is still a novelty in this country. For over a decade, South Africans learned to live around the flicker and failure of light. We became a nation of candle-hoarders and inverter-shoppers, a people who could braai in the dark and laugh through the blackout. And then, quietly, the lights stayed on. By September 2026, Eskom had recorded over 476 days without load shedding. The energy availability factor had clawed its way back from a low of 54.7 percent to the mid-sixties. But here is what fascinates me and what the Spirit of God wants to teach us through it the recovery...

Obedience Is The Currency

Obedience Is The Currency A Devotional for the Account That Heaven Is Waiting to Settle By Harold Mawela, from Akasia, Pretoria The Diagnosis: A Nation of Unsettled Accounts I live in Akasia, a stone's throw from the Union Buildings where power is brokered but a world away from the corridors where decisions are made. From my modest stoep, I have watched the purple jacaranda blooms fall and trampled into the dust of another Highveld summer. That season of spectacular beauty has given way to a more honest terrain the hard, sunbaked earth. And this, my friends, is the perfect metaphor for our current moment. Consider the headlines that assault us daily. Thirteen bodies of women recovered in Ekurhuleni since July. Youth unemployment sitting at a suffocating 60.9% for those aged 15 to 24. A nation where the macro-economy shows signs of improvement while the micro-reality in a million households remains crushing. We are a people waiting waiting for arrests, waiting for jobs, waiti...

A Goodbye That Guards You

A Goodbye That Guards You The Sacred Art of Releasing What Heaven Has Finished The Diagnosis: When the Heart Becomes a Warehouse Let me tell you about a night in Akasia that God used to break me open. It was late September, and the jacarandas along the Wonderpark stretch were just beginning to purple. I had driven past the mobile police truck parked at the mall the one Akasia SAPS introduced to bring services closer to our community. I remember thinking: that truck is doing exactly what I cannot do. It moves. It serves. It releases one location and advances to the next. Meanwhile, my own heart had become a warehouse a storage facility for expired relationships, abandoned dreams, and seasons God had long since sealed. I sat in my car outside my complex, and the Spirit said something that cut me: "You are not grieving what died. You are embalming it." There is a difference, child of God. There is a world of difference between honouring a memory and hosting a corpse. South Afri...

Peace Is Your Permission Slip

Peace Is Your Permission Slip Colossians 3:15 — "Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts." The Door That Looked Like Destiny I want to tell you about a door that opened for me in Akasia. It was 2023, and I was between seasons — ministry opportunities were thin, finances were thinning faster, and my spirit was threadbare. Then a phone call came. A man with a large smile and an even larger Bible invited me to join a "Kingdom enterprise" — a business venture that promised to multiply my income and expand my influence. The door was wide open. The terms were flattering. The timeline was urgent. But something in my gut would not settle. I prayed. I fasted. I sought counsel. Every logical argument said walk through. Every spiritual indicator said stand still. The peace was absent. Not because I feared failure I have failed before and survived. Not because I lacked faith —I have stepped into storms with nothing but a word from God. The peace was absent because the Spiri...

The Ache That Announces Assignment

THE ACHE THAT ANNOUNCES ASSIGNMENT I was standing in the Checkers aisle in Akasia Mall when the ache came for the hundredth time. It was the same ache the one that visits at 3 a.m. and refuses to leave a forwarding address. The one that ambushes you in prayer meetings and makes you weep without explanation. The one that, if you are honest, you have been trying to medicate with busyness, with noise, with Netflix and amapiano and the endless scroll of other people's victories on social media. I looked at the water bottles on the shelf — shelves that were often empty, because Akasia's reservoirs had been running dry, and the taps in our homes had become politicians of promise: full of talk, empty of delivery. And I thought of Nehemiah. I thought of a man with a cushioned job and a king's favour, who heard one report from Jerusalem and sat down and wept for days【Nehemiah 1:4】. He was not weeping because he had lost something. He was weeping because he saw something — a broken...