Failure Isn't Final. Harold Mawela

Worship Is the Exit From Worry By Harold Mawela, Akasia, Pretoria Let me begin with a confession. Last Tuesday, I sat in my car in the parking lot of a shopping centre in Akasia, and I did not pray. I worried. I worried about the rand. I worried about the fact that a national survey recently told us that nearly eighteen percent of South Africans are walking around with probable anxiety, and that figure climbs higher in our metros, in our concrete jungles where the noise never stops and the money never stretches . I worried about the elections, about the coalition talks that will follow, about the posters plastered on every lamppost promising salvation through a ballot box . I worried about my own household. And then, in that same parking lot, a song came on the radio one of those old hymns my grandmother used to sing while she swept the stoep in Winterveld and I found myself doing something I had not planned. I began to sing. Not well. Not loudly. But the moment my mouth opened, someth...

 # The Question Before The Answer **John 5:6 (NIV)** — *"When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, 'Do you want to get well?'"* ## I. The Diagnosis: Drowning in Answers, Dying for Questions We live in the most answered generation in history. Your phone can tell you the weather in Tokyo, the score in Durban and the price of petrol before you finish your coffee. Yet many of us are still lying beside the same pool we lay beside ten years ago. Here is the first law: **information multiplies answers, but only revelation multiplies understanding.** The problem in our homes, churches and boardrooms is not a shortage of answers. It is a famine of good questions. Let us define our terms. An *answer* closes a door. A *question* chooses which door to knock on. A *complaint* is a question that has stopped expecting an answer. ## II. The Investigation: Thirty-Eight Years at the Wrong Address Picture Bethesda. Five ...

 The Theology of the Unscattered Arrow By Harold Mawela, from my study in Akasia, Pretoria The Diagnosis: A Nation of Scattered Arrows From my window in Akasia, I watch the Jacaranda trees prepare to bloom and the N14 crawl with cars carrying a thousand ambitions in a single direction and none at all. We are a people of immense potential, are we not? We have the most sophisticated constitution on earth, the richest mineral soil beneath our feet, and a youth population bursting with digital fluency that rivals Silicon Valley. Yet we stand at the crossroads of promise and paralysis, clutching a dozen good things while missing the one great thing. Consider the streets of Johannesburg this very week. Residents banged plastic water bottles in Melville, protesting a municipality that cannot keep water in their taps . A nation holds its breath as 510 SANDF members deploy to KwaZulu-Natal to quell violence born of misinformation . Our politics fractures, our infrastructure groans, our elec...

THE WOMB CALLED EXPECTATION A Meditation on Psalm 62:5 — "My hope comes from Him" The Diagnosis: When Prayer Becomes a Stillbirth Let me tell you about a Tuesday afternoon in Akasia that changed the architecture of my prayer life. I was driving past the corner of Daan de Wet Nel Drive and Rachel de Beer Street  you know that intersection, where the taxis dance and the robots blink their impatient rhythm when I heard a woman on the radio, a caller to some Christian programme, weeping about prayers unanswered. She had been praying for her son for eleven years. Eleven years of faithful kneeling, faithful fasting, faithful tears. And she said something that stopped my heart mid-beat: "Maybe God is just not willing." In that moment, I felt the Holy Spirit press upon my chest a question I had never considered: What if she had been willing, but her willingness was wrapped in a womb too small to receive? We have a saying in Sesotho: "Ngoana o tshoaroa ka matsoho, eseng...

 THE GEOGRAPHY OF GOD: Where Your Ending Becomes His Beginning A Devotional Meditation on Luke 1:37 Written from Akasia, Pretoria — where the Jacaranda trees bloom purple against the Highveld sky, and where I have learned that God's greatest miracles often grow in the soil of our greatest impossibilities. The Diagnosis: We Have Misread the Map Let me tell you something that happened to me last Tuesday. I was sitting in my car at the intersection of Moloto Road and the N1, watching the traffic pile up like unanswered prayers. My phone buzzed  another message from a friend whose business had collapsed. Another from a cousin whose marriage was on life support. Another from a young person in my community whose dreams had been swallowed by the unemployment statistics that haunt our nation like a persistent ghost. And I thought to myself: We are a people surrounded by impossibilities. Load shedding strips away our power. Inflation devours our salaries. Crime stalks our streets. Dise...

Recognition Multiplies: The Law of the Returned Eyes Topic: Gratitude as Spiritual Intelligence Text: Luke 17:15–19 Pretoria, Akasia. A Tuesday evening. The rain has just stopped. I am sitting on my stoep in Akasia, watching the N1 traffic crawl past like a column of ants carrying burdens too heavy for their bodies. The smell of wet earth rises from the garden. My neighbour’s generator hums its familiar lament the soundtrack of South African resilience. And I am thinking about ten men, nine of whom walked past the greatest miracle of their lives and never looked back. Let me tell you something about recognition. It is not a feeling. It is a faculty. And like any faculty, it can atrophy. The Diagnosis: Eyes That See but Do Not Perceive Luke tells us that ten lepers were cleansed. Ten. Not one. Ten men whose flesh, moments before, had been a living death sentence. Leprosy in the first century was not merely a disease; it was a social execution. The leper was the walking dead—banished fro...