Failure Isn't Final. Harold Mawela

The Fire of Liberation Where Freedom Begins The jacarandas are dying again outside my Akasia window. Not the trees themselves—those stubborn survivors are still standing, as they have through every Pretoria October for decades—but the purple blossoms are falling, carpeting the pavement in a regal death shroud. It happens every year. They bloom with such audacious, defiant beauty, painting our concrete-gray suburb with the colors of royalty, only to surrender their petals to the first autumn wind. It's a beautiful, brutal, annual reminder: even the most glorious things must fall. I was staring at this purple funeral procession last Tuesday morning, nursing a cup of rooibos and a particularly stubborn grudge. The grudge, you see, was against a man who had wronged me in a business deal. His name doesn't matter. What matters is that I had built him a palace in my mind. Every morning, I'd wake up and walk through its corridors, admiring the tapestries of his offenses, polishing ...

I sat in my study in Akasia, Pretoria, watching the news flicker across my screen. The headlines of 2026 were a familiar chorus: a protest march in Durban demanding action on immigration laws, a nation hitting 300 days without loadshedding, and yet, simmering beneath the surface, a cost-of-living crisis where the price of bread and school fees still kept families awake at night. As a pastor, my phone buzzed with messages from people trapped in these very knots. They spoke of financial pressure, family strain, and a gnawing fear of the future. That's when the Lord whispered a profound paradox to my spirit: "Harold, they are fighting shadows with swords, but their lamp sits unlit behind them." Every problem you face is not a location crisis; it is a revelation deficit. The darkness you are wrestling with is not stronger than the light you have refused to activate. The Wisdom War Within Your Problem Scripture: "Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not; neither decli...

The Peaceful Prisoner: How to Sleep When Your World Is On Fire By Harold Mawela From my study in Akasia, Pretoria, I am writing this on a Tuesday morning that feels like a loud Friday. The air is thick with the hum of generators, a sound we have learned to love, because it means the power is on. We have officially passed three hundred days without the dreaded load shedding, a modern South African miracle. But if you live in Akasia, or Roodepoort where an explosion recently plunged thousands into darkness, you know the truth: the lights may be on, but the grid is still groaning. Our peace, like the power supply, feels temporary, a fragile thing borrowed against the next fault. And yet, this morning, I am not thinking about the power grid. I am thinking about a different kind of prison, and a man who slept through his own execution date. I am thinking about Peter. The Paradox of Peter's Peace The Scripture is stark and beautiful in its brevity: “The night before Herod was to bring hi...

It was the kind of Tuesday afternoon in Akasia that makes you question all your life choices. The power had just clicked off—load reduction, Eskom called it, though for our home in Pretoria North, the distinction between a planned outage and a crisis was purely academic. My laptop battery was gasping its last digital breath, the kids’ homework was vanishing into the gloom, and a familiar, simmering frustration began to bubble in my chest. In the middle of my grumbling, my neighbor, Gogo Mthembu, a woman whose faith is as solid as the Magaliesberg mountains, called over the fence. “Ah, Harold,” she chuckled, her voice a warm beacon in the deepening dusk. “Don’t you see? The darkness just makes His light in us shine brighter. The Sanhedrin met in fancy rooms, but we meet here, in the shadows. It is the perfect place for His power to be made perfect.” Her words, simple and profound, landed like a perfectly placed stone, sending ripples through my self-pity. She was right. I had been so fo...

The Name That Breaks the Back of Paralysis Scripture: "Silver or gold I do not have, but what I do have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk." — Acts 3:6 Part One: The Man at the Beautiful Gate Let me take you to a place you know very well—a gate. Not just any gate, but the Beautiful Gate of the temple in Jerusalem. Imagine, if you will, a man sprawled on a mat so worn that the fibres whisper the story of forty years of waiting. Forty years of being carried. Forty years of being laid down. Forty years of watching sandals shuffle past—priests in their fine linen, merchants counting coins, women bearing sacrifices. He asked for silver. He asked for gold. He had trained his tongue to beg before he could walk. Every morning, someone carried him up that steep path to the temple. Every evening, someone carried him back to a dark room where the only sound was his own breathing and the rats scrambling for scraps. But here is the paradox that will either liberate ...

From Denier to Declarer By Harold Mawela (Akasia, Pretoria) Part I: The Man Who Crumbled I still remember the morning. It was 1998—barely a month after my salvation. The sun was painting the Union Buildings gold as I walked to my aunt’s house in Soshanguve. My heart was full of Scripture. I had memorised John 3:16 in three languages. I had prayed for an hour before sunrise. I was ready to conquer hell with a hymnbook. Then my cousin Thabo walked in. He was drunk. His eyes were the colour of regret. He laughed at my Bible. He mocked my prayer language. He called me a "holier-than-thou sellout." And I crumbled. I didn't preach. I didn't pray. I didn't even open my mouth. I laughed along. I denied my King before I had even learned to pronounce His name properly. I was Peter before the rooster crowed—except my rooster was a 1.5-litre bottle of Black Label. That memory haunted me for years. Every time I stood to preach in Akasia, that morning whispered, “You’re a fraud...

THE VICTORY IN THE FINISHED WORK "When he had received the drink, Jesus said, 'It is finished.' With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit." — John 19:30 PART ONE: A FRIDAY IN AKASIA Let me take you to a funeral I attended last month in Soshanguve. The tent was collapsing under the weight of weeping. A young man—twenty-three, vibrant, full of dreams—had been caught in the crossfire of a taxi rank dispute. Bullets do not ask your age. They do not check your portfolio of ambitions. They simply find flesh and finish. As the pastor preached about "God's perfect plan," I watched the mother. She was not nodding. She was staring at the coffin as if her stare alone could reverse the irreversible. And I thought to myself: This is what Saturday feels like. Because Friday—the day of the shooting—was chaos. Ambulances, screaming, blood, prayer warriors speaking in tongues, social media tributes with broken-heart emojis. But Saturday? Saturday is the silence...

The War in Your Will: A Gethsemane Strategy for a Nation on the Brink By Harold Mawela Akasia, Pretoria The jacaranda trees outside my window in Akasia have just exploded into that furious purple bloom—October’s divine confetti carpeting our streets, sticking to tires, clinging to windscreens like God’s stubborn grace. But this morning, as I scraped petals off my old sedan before heading to the AFM church, I found myself staring at something else: the fuel gauge. R3.06 per litre more for petrol. R7.37 more for diesel. Paraffin—the lifeline of our poorest—up by nearly R12. A 15% jump in petrol. A 35% leap in diesel. And somewhere in Hammanskraal, a mother lights a paraffin stove in a one-room shelter, three children studying by a flickering flame, wondering how she will make next week’s SASSA grant stretch to cover the hike. Just yesterday, labour federations announced coordinated action against this soaring cost of living, warning that workers are being “trapped” by rising prices, unem...

The Rooster’s Restoration: When Failure Becomes Your Foundation By Harold Mawela Akasia, Pretoria Scripture: “The Lord turned and looked straight at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word the Lord had spoken to him: ‘Before the rooster crows today, you will disown me three times.’ And he went outside and wept bitterly.” (Luke 22:61-62) I woke up this past Tuesday to the sound of a rooster crowing somewhere in the dusty streets of Akasia. My neighbour, old Mr. Dlamini, keeps a few chickens in his backyard—much to the annoyance of the municipality, but that is a story for another day. That crow pierced the morning silence like a prophet’s whisper. And immediately, my mind went to Simon Peter. Now, let me be honest with you. For years, I preached Peter’s denial as a cautionary tale—a warning against pride, a lesson in failure. I stood behind pulpits in Mamelodi, in Soshanguve, in the city centre, and I would point my finger and say, “Don’t be like Peter! He boasted when he should have pray...