The Chronicles of Load-Shedding . Harold Mawela

The Law of the True Name: Why You Walk Like a Pauper When the King Calls You His Child Let me tell you a story of two names. Last Tuesday, in the grinding gridlock of the N1, my fuel light glared like an accusing eye. Load-shedding had stolen my chance to charge, and the anxiety was a physical weight. I pulled into a garage in Akasia, my spirit as empty as my tank. The attendant, his face etched with the weariness of our times, moved with a slow, defeated shuffle. As I handed him cash, our eyes met. I saw it—not just fatigue, but a deep, settled resignation. He was not just a man doing a job; he was a man defined by the job, by the struggle, by the relentless kaffir of South African life. The world had written a name on his forehead: Invisible. Struggling. Not Enough. Is that not the air we breathe? A culture that names you by your credit score, your social media likes, your clan name, your past failures, or the political party you despise the least. We are baptized in a river of other...

Anchored in the Storm: The Supreme Philosophy of Christ for a Shifting Continent By Harold Mawela | Akasia, Pretoria The Day I Couldn’t Find South Africa Let me tell you about the morning I woke up and could not find my country. Oh, the map was still there—the familiar boot-like shape at the southern tip of the continent. The roads still led to Pretoria, the lights still flickered over Johannesburg. But the soul of the place, the foundational truth we stood on, seemed to have vanished into a digital fog. It was the week after our nation, a beacon of complex hope, hosted the G20—a monumental first for an African state. Yet instead of a chorus of unity, my social media scroll was a battlefield. One side declared us heroes for standing against global powers; the other prophesied economic ruin from severed trade ties and aid cuts. My cousin’s WhatsApp status read, “They are cutting us off,” while a news alert blared about our continent being projected as the world’s fastest-growing economy...

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...

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...

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...

 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...