Failure Isn't Final. Harold Mawela

 The Fortress of the Fixed Mind A devotional meditation from Akasia, Pretoria The Diagnosis: A Nation Held Hostage by Foreboding I want to tell you about a conversation I had this week at the corner of Daan de Wet Nel Drive and Wonderboom Airport Road. A young man, perhaps twenty-six, sat in his Toyota Etios with the engine running. He wasn't going anywhere. He was simply... waiting. Waiting for what? "Pastor," he said, "I'm waiting for the next terrible thing to happen." He is not alone. We are a nation learning to breathe while bracing for impact. The crime statistics released in August tell us murder has decreased by 5.9%, contact crime by 2.3%. But statistics do not silence the scream in the night. Numbers cannot nurse the wound. And so we live as a people perpetually flinching flinching at the knock on the gate, flinching at the WhatsApp message that begins with "I'm sorry to tell you," flinching at the news alert that another woman's ...

 What Grows Underground John 12:24 "Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds." The Impatience of the Living I am writing this from my study in Akasia, where the jacarandas have finally shed their purple and the evenings carry that Highveld chill that makes you grateful for a working geyser. But that gratitude is still a novelty in this country. For over a decade, South Africans learned to live around the flicker and failure of light. We became a nation of candle-hoarders and inverter-shoppers, a people who could braai in the dark and laugh through the blackout. And then, quietly, the lights stayed on. By September 2026, Eskom had recorded over 476 days without load shedding. The energy availability factor had clawed its way back from a low of 54.7 percent to the mid-sixties. But here is what fascinates me and what the Spirit of God wants to teach us through it the recovery...