The Chronicles of Load-Shedding . Harold Mawela

The Grip of Grace The thunderous, grating roar of my neighbour’s generator is the soundtrack to my writing this. Loadshedding Stage 6. Again. The sudden silence was first a shock, then a familiar frustration. My carefully planned work, my digital tether to the world, my light—all severed by a switch I cannot control. And in the ensuing, infuriating darkness, the same old, frantic script begins in my mind: How will I meet my deadline? What if the food spoils? When will this end? My knuckles were white, not on a steering wheel this time, but on the edge of my desk, wrestling a phantom of control. This, my friends, is the modern South African theatre where a ancient spiritual battle is staged daily. We are a nation of survivors, of braai-masters making a plan, of hustlers fighting for a sliver of stability in a grid that keeps failing. We worship at the altar of self-sufficiency, believing the great lie of our age: that we are the authors of our own destiny, the sole engineers of our pers...

Title: The Unlikely Arsenal: Why Your Scars Are Your Strength Scripture: "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed." - 1 Peter 2:24 Here in Akasia, as the Highveld sun sets in a blaze of orange and the chorus of neighbourhood braais begins, I look at the jagged line on my own arm. It’s a relic from a foolish boyhood adventure, a permanent signature on my skin. For years, I saw it as a flaw, something to be hidden. But the Holy Spirit has a way of reframing our perspectives, of turning our souvenirs of suffering into sanctuaries of truth. This scar, and perhaps one you carry too, is not a flaw. It is forensic evidence. Let’s define our terms clearly, for the world often gets this wrong. The world says a scar is a sign of failure, of a wound not fully erased, a vulnerability to be concealed with creams or cosmetics. It is the aesthetic of the unblemished, the cult of the curated life...

(A soft, insistent glow from my phone lights up the darkened room. Load-shedding has plunged Akasia into a quiet hum of generators and patient shadows. The notification is a headline about another political scandal, a whirlpool of accusations and outrage. Another buzz: a meme mocking faith. Another: a demand for immediate work, though the hour is late. My soul feels like a battlefield, and the enemy isn't a single army, but a thousand tiny darts of distraction, doubt, and despair.) The Unseen War for Your Attention Scripture: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” - Ephesians 6:12 (NIV) We have misunderstood the nature of the war. We think the battle is out there—in the chaotic political arena, in the demanding workplace, in the frustrating traffic jam on the N1. But friends, the primary theatre of this spiritual combat ...

The Tongue’s Tiller Scripture: "The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit." - Proverbs 18:21 (NIV) My friends, let me tell you about the day my tongue became a weapon of mass destruction. It was right here, in the thick of a Pretoria traffic jam, the sun baking the tar on the N1. My phone buzzed with a message from a brother in the faith, questioning a decision I’d made. Instead of pausing, instead of praying, I let fly a fiery flurry of words on WhatsApp—a sarcastic, self-righteous retort. I didn’t just type it; I launched it. I hit send, and instantly, the Holy Spirit pricked my heart. The digital silence that followed was heavier than the load-shedding darkness that falls over Akasia each evening. My words, like a reckless farmer scattering weed seeds, had sown thorny thistles of tension in a field God had called me to cultivate. I had to call him, my voice shaky, and ask for forgiveness. The damage was done in a second; the repai...

The Furious Faithfulness of God: When Your Grid Fails Scripture: “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.” – Isaiah 43:19 (NIV) My world went dark. Not just the predictable, scheduled darkness of Eskom’s loadshedding, but a deeper, more personal blackout. The contract in Centurion—my "Cherished Creek," a steady stream of income and professional identity I had carefully canalised and controlled—dried up without warning. The financial and emotional power was cut. Despair, that desperate debtor, immediately showed up at my door, demanding I pay with my peace and dwell in the dimness of doubt. But here is the truth I had to grasp, a truth as solid as the granite of the Magaliesberg: Divine disruption is not destruction; it is direction. God was not merely closing a chapter; He was compelling a crucial change of course. My faithful forward motion, not mournful stagnation, is what acti...

The Generator and the Eternal River: Finding Power in the Inner Well There I was, in my Akasia home, when the familiar dread descended—load-shedding. The lights flickered and died. My first, frantic thought was for my powerless phone—my connection to the world, now a dark, silent slab. For a moment, panic whispered. Then, I heard it: the steady, rumbling hum of my backup generator kicking in. Power, from a source unseen, restored light and connection. And in that mundane modern miracle, the Spirit spoke. How often do we, like frantic souls, scramble for a charging cable of external validation—from social media posts, from people's opinions, from the unstable grid of worldly success? We scroll for sparks of joy, plug into faulty sockets of fleeting pleasure, all while forgetting the perpetual power plant planted within us at salvation. The Lord Jesus declared, “Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them” (John 7:38). The Divine H...

The Unshakable Foundation: Building a Life That Withstands South African Storms The Cracked Foundation Just last week, I watched a crew demolish a dilapidated shed right here in Akasia. With one mighty push, it crumbled into dust and debris. The foreman shrugged and said those telling words: "Faulty foundation." My mind immediately raced to our own lives—how we construct our dreams, our identities, our very sense of worth on foundations that cannot hold. I've seen my own carefully constructed aspirations collapse like that shed when built on the shifting sand of public opinion, crumbling at a single critic's comment. Is this not the story of our nation? We live in a South Africa where foundations are cracking. I read recently in a government statement about violent incidents at schools in Boksburg and Pretoria—stabbings, assaults, bullying captured on video . We see this same instability in our national power grid, where the 2025 Integrated Resource Plan acknowledges ...

The Burden’s Blessing Let me tell you a story from right here in Akasia, under our relentless summer sun. For weeks, the relentless "load-shedding" had become more than an inconvenience; it was a cage . My own spirit was experiencing its own scheduled blackouts—frustration with the national grid mirrored a deeper frustration with a project at work that felt equally stuck, a burden on my shoulders and my time. One evening, during another scheduled outage, I sat in the fading light on my porch near the Akasia Golf Club. The silence was deafening. No humming fridge, no television news, just the weight of my own thoughts. I prayed, not with eloquent words, but with a groan of the spirit: "Lord, take this burden away. Restore the power. Fix this problem." And in the quiet, a different kind of current began to flow—the unmistakable whisper of the Holy Spirit. It was not the answer I wanted. He said, "Stop seeking an exit from the load-shedding. This darkness is not y...

The Refiner’s Gaze: Finding Purpose in God’Painful Pruning From My Pretoria Garden to God’s Refining Fire “He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.” - Malachi 3:3 This morning, the jacaranda blooms outside my Akasia window were being brutally pruned. I winced at the severed branches littering the pavement, their purple glory fading to brown. “Such waste,” I muttered. But the gardener, noticing my dismay, chuckled warmly: “Sir, this isn’t destruction. It’s direction. All this energy diverted to the blooms will make the tree magnificent.” His words humbled me. How often do I perceive God’s pruning as punishment rather than purposeful redirection? The divine Gardener is always skillfully severing what saps our spiritual strength, ensuring our energy flows toward eternal, exquisite bloom. The Ancient Art of Holy Refinement That gardening encounter led me deeper into the prophet Malachi’s world, where God presents Himself not merely as gardener but as master silversmith. In Malachi’...

The Giant as Gateway: When Crisis Becomes Christ's Platform The Day I Faced My Mine Shaft Giant The dust of Akasia settles in the evening light as I look out from my veranda. I recall standing at the edge of a different kind of precipice just months ago—staring into the deep darkness of a professional crisis that threatened to swallow me whole. The email arrived at 3:17 PM on a Tuesday: "Position eliminated. Effective immediately." The words glared from my screen like a Goliath's taunt. Thirty years of work, vanished in a digital instant. My stomach hollowed out, my hands trembled, and the familiar dread of uncertainty coiled around my heart. This, my friends, was my giant—not a Philistine from Gath, but the terrifying spectre of irrelevance and financial collapse in a South Africa where nearly 33% cannot find work . But something shifted in me that afternoon. As I read David's words once more—"The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and the bear w...

The Prisoner’s Key My friend, let me tell you a story that unfolded just a short drive from my home in Akasia. Last week, I found myself standing in the hollow, echoing cell of the old Kgosi Mampuru prison in central Pretoria. My fingers gripped the same rusted bars that have held men like Bantu Steve Biko and Solomon Mahlangu. As I stood there, the weight of my own past failings and shames felt as real and cold as the steel in my hands. I was a free man in a decommissioned prison, yet I felt captive. Then, the revelation struck me with the force of a physical blow: the cell door was wide open. I was not trapped by the past; I was choosing to remain in a prison Christ had already demolished. The Anatomy of Our Self-Made Prisons We often speak of spiritual prisons as if they are dungeons into which we are thrown by a cruel fate. But Scripture reveals a more uncomfortable truth: we are often our own jailers. The apostle Paul, writing from a very real Roman prison, declared, "Forgett...

Your Ark Awaits: Obedience in an Age of Opinion There I stood, staring at architectural plans that felt as foreign as the faith they demanded. In my Akasia neighbourhood, where the summer heat radiates off the tin roofs and the scent of braai smoke carries conversations of struggle and hope, my own vision felt absurd. For months, I sought validation—from learned friends, from respected uncles, from the very culture that taught me ubuntu—that a person is a person through other people. But my pursuit of communal consensus became a prison. The blueprint was clear in my spirit, yet I was paralysed, fearing the sidelong glances and whispered critiques more than I feared disobeying the Divine Architect. My ark was waiting, and I was forming a focus group. The Noise of the Crowd Versus the Voice of the Command In our South African context, where community is woven into our very DNA, this truth confronts us: Obedience often requires solitary courage. We cherish the collective, but faith someti...

The Faithful Few: Why Your Divine Promotion Depends on Those Petty Problems Scripture: “His lord said unto him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant; thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things.’” – Matthew 25:23 (KJV) The Interruption That Illuminated Everything The relentless beep-beep-beep of my load-shedding alarm clock echoed my internal frustration that Friday morning. Eskom's relentless schedule had become the backdrop to my ministerial life here in Akasia, a perpetual reminder of systems failing and lights going dim. With precious sermon preparation hours before me, I looked at the blank page on my screen with a certain desperation—the Sunday deadline loomed like a gathering storm. Then my phone buzzed. Again. The screen revealed the name of a parishioner known for what I had privately labelled "petty problems." My thumb hovered over the "ignore" button, my mind screaming about content creation, exegetical precisio...