The Chronicles of Load-Shedding . Harold Mawela

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...

The Curator of Souls: Why Your True Heritage is the Only Exhibit Heaven Recognizes Let me tell you about a conversation I overheard last week, right here in Pretoria. Two young entrepreneurs were excitedly discussing the new Africa-Europe heritage tourism project. They spoke of turning our sacred sites—places like the ǂKhomani Cultural Landscape—into “experiences,” of “curating narratives” for a global audience. Their eyes shone with the promise of opportunity, and part of me rejoiced. Yet, a deeper, prophetic disquiet settled in my spirit. For in our fervor to package our cultural heritage for the world, we are in grave danger of mastering a skill that is destroying our souls: the art of the curated life. We are all becoming curators. We meticulously arrange the exhibits of our public persona—the successes on social media, the virtuous opinions on geopolitics, the performative piety on Sunday. We present a polished, themed exhibition called “My Life,” while the backrooms of our hearts...

 The Anvil of the Almighty: Where Purpose is Forged in Pressure By Harold Mawela | Akasia, Pretoria | 28 January 2026 There’s a sound that defines our season here in Akasia, in the shadow of the Magaliesberg. It’s not the summer rain on the tin roofs, nor the birds at dawn. It’s the sound of construction. Every morning, the relentless percussion of hammers and the growl of cement mixers from the new full-title developments in Amandasig echo through the streets. To some, it’s a noise nuisance. To me, sitting on my porch with my Bible and my thoughts, it’s a symphony of divine metaphor. They are building homes from the ground up. But God, I have learned, often builds our destinies from the rubble down. He does not commence with the rooftop pool or the polished floors. He starts with the trench, the deep, painful excavation of the foundation. Before the palace, the pit. Before the promise, the pressure. I know this sound intimately, for it has been the soundtrack to my own spirit. Las...

The Unlocked Cage: Why Your Greatest Prison is Your Permission A Morning in Akasia, and the Cage I Carried The morning mist still clung to the Magaliesberg when I felt the familiar walls close in. There I was, in my study in Akasia, Pretoria, with a Bible open, a world of promise before me, and yet a silent, desperate narrative played in my mind: “You cannot. The circumstances are too complex. The vision is too vast for someone from here.” I was preaching to thousands about a God of breakthroughs while privately reciting the detailed description of my own locks. I was not in a cage of circumstance, but in a cage of my own consent. The door was unlocked, yet I was an expert in the mechanism of the bolt. This is the silent heresy of the modern believer, especially here in South Africa, where our tangible struggles make such cages feel so justifiable, so real. Our nation itself stands at a crossroads, navigating a world of American isolationism and punitive tariffs, where our hard-won sea...

The Law of the Divine Kiln: Why Your Delay is Not a Denial A Personal Story from Akasia Just this past Tuesday, I stood in my kitchen in Akasia, Pretoria, staring at a pot of water on the stove. The power had tripped again—a too-familiar dance with our beloved load-shedding schedule. I needed that water to boil for coffee, but the element was dark and cold. My schedule was shouting, my patience thinning. In that mundane moment, the Spirit whispered: You cannot rage a cold coil into heat. You must wait for the power to come. We are a nation of people staring at cold pots, are we not? We wait for the lights to come on, for the economy to boil, for the promises we’ve prayed over to finally simmer into reality. We live in the tension between the “now” of our anxiety and the “not yet” of God’s promise. And our great modern sin is not immorality, but impatience. We believe the lie that speed is synonymous with success, and that delay is the evidence of divine denial. Let me define our terms ...

(A Devotional Discourse on Divine Impartiality and the Crooked Scale) The Uncrooked Scale: Why Your Favouritism is a Declaration of War on God’s Community Listen, my friend. Let me tell you about a battle fought not with spears, but with glances. Not in the streets of our restless cities, but in the hidden chambers of the human heart. It happens in the church foyer after service. It simmers in the family braai where one uncle’s new car is celebrated and another’s unemployment is a silent, awkward ghost. It screams from our social media feeds, where we curate our compassion based on tribe, status, and political chant. We are living in a nation, right here in the shadow of Pretoria’s jacarandas, where the scales of our regard are bent, warped, and utterly crooked. I saw it just last week. We were in a meeting, voices raised about the very future of our community, tensions high like the Pretoria heat. And there it was—the subtle tilt. The argument from the man in the fine suit was given w...

The Unpopular Truth: Why Righteousness Will Never Trend on Social Media From my study window here in Akasia, I watch the world go by on Daan de Wet Nel Drive. I see the hurried commuters, the patrols of the Tshwane Metro Police, and sometimes, the haunting evidence of our brokenness—like the recent discovery of a life discarded in the bushes. This is my context: a nation in tension, where the glow of smartphones illuminates both our dreams and our despair. We scroll through curated perfection while local headlines scream of fraud, murder, and tragic accidents. We are a generation, especially our brilliant, travel-hungry Gen Z, endlessly seeking the next authentic experience, the next truth to follow. But I must tell you a foundational law, a principle as solid as the Pretoria granite beneath our feet: Truth is not determined by consensus, and righteousness will never be voted into popularity. You will never see a hashtag trend that says, “#DenyYourself.” No viral challenge will champio...

The Law of the Second-Mile Mandate: Where Miracles Hitchhike A Pretoria Morning Revelation The winter sun cuts a hard, bright line across my Akasia veranda, catching the dust motes dancing over yesterday’s Beeld newspaper. The headlines shout their usual chorus: “GNU Strains Intensify”; “Coalition Partners Spar Over Power”; “Economic Growth Stalls at 1.2%”. In my hands, a lukewarm cup of Rooibos tea. In my spirit, a familiar, heavy sigh—the weight of a nation perpetually navigating its first mile of duty, where promises are made, quotas are filled, and the bare minimum of obligation is often hailed as a triumph. But this morning, a different scripture arrested me, not with comfort, but with a holy confrontation: “And whoever compels you to go one mile, go with him two.” (Matthew 5:41). I’ve read it a hundred times. Today, it read me. It saw my resigned acceptance of a faith that fulfills duties and a life that meets expectations. And it issued a mandate. The revelation was this: Our na...

The Daily Weaving of Divine Justice: From Akasia’s Soil to a Kingdom’s Fabric Let me tell you about the fence. Not the political kind, but the literal, wooden one in my backyard here in Akasia. Last year, I decided to build it myself. Each picket, I thought, was a small thing. A minor choice of alignment, a single nail driven in. Some days, tired from writing, I’d be tempted to rush—to let a post sit slightly crooked, to skip a nail. “Who will see it?” I’d whisper to myself. But I knew. Months later, the fence stood: a strong, straight line defining my home, weathering the Pretoria storms. It did not appear by grand declaration, but by the cumulative power of a hundred small, faithful choices. So it is with justice. We often imagine it as a distant, majestic edifice—a constitutional court, a landmark ruling, a thundering prophet on a national stage. But Scripture reveals a profoundly personal truth: justice is first a fabric, woven daily on the loom of our mundane, consistent choices. ...

The Lens of Eternity: A View from Akasia By Harold Mawela I. A Dark Night in Akasia: The Stone and the Mountain I write these words from my study in Akasia, Pretoria. The night is quiet, but the silence is the heavy kind—the kind that follows a day of load-shedding, a week of worrying news, and a lifetime of “what ifs.” Just this afternoon, I spoke with a young man from our community. His eyes, usually bright with ambition, were dull with defeat. “What’s the point?” he asked. “I send out CVs like prayers, but the answer is always silence. The crime news is grim, the future feels fixed. Is this all there is?” His question hung in the air, a familiar weight. It’s the weight of the temporal—the crushing focus on the immediate stone that stubs our toe, blinding us to the distant mountain we are called to climb. We live in a moment where, as one recent analysis put it, South Africans are “weary, yet increasingly hopeful”—weary of unemployment stubbornly near 32%, weary of crime that erodes ...