Dashing Into Hope

Michelle Pierce owns the only independent bookstore in Malibu, California. Over a period of two years, she kept it open through two wildfires, an earthquake, a mudslide, and a six-month road closure that cut her town off from Los Angeles (Alin, 2026). Customers could not reach her, and many assumed she had closed for good. Some days the register took in nothing. She would later call 2025 “the most hopeless time in my life” (Alin, 2026). Yet every morning she unlocked the door.

Many of us understand the twin feelings of hopelessness alongside of persistence as Election Day approaches. Gallup reported this year that Americans’ hope for their future has fallen to a new low (Sanders, 2026). A Harvard poll found that only 26% of young Americans feel hopeful about the country’s future, down from 55% in 2021, and this decline crosses party lines (Palmer, 2026). Gallup’s researcher also observed that optimism tends to rise for whichever party holds power; and sinks for the other (Sanders, 2026). Hope hitched to a ballot box rises and falls with the returns. On November 3, whichever way the count goes, many of our neighbors will wake up discouraged.

An entrepreneur in a documentary offered a better picture. In “The Call of the Entrepreneur,” Jimmy Lai, who fled Communist China as a young man and left his family behind to take his chances in Hong Kong, describes the risk-taker as “dashing into hope” (Acton Institute, 2007). Lai knows what that costs. Today he is 78 and serving a 20-year sentence in a Hong Kong prison (NBC News, 2026). His family says confinement has only deepened his faith (EWTN News, 2025). He is not an optimist in the ordinary sense. He is a man who ran toward something he could not yet see and has not stopped trusting it.

That raises the question every entrepreneur eventually faces. A dash is reckless unless you know to where you are running. What exactly are we dashing into?

R.C. Sproul warned that we misread the New Testament because we hear the word “hope” the way we use it at a picnic, as a wish with a cloud of doubt over it. In Scripture, he explained, hope is “faith looking forward.” Faith rests on what God has already done, and hope leans on what He has promised to do. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews described our hope in God this way: “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure” (Hebrews 6:19 NIV). The New Testament’s image is an anchor, the settled assurance that God will do everything He has said (Sproul, 2025).

John Piper arrives at the same place by another road. In ordinary speech, he observed, we say “I hope” to admit uncertainty. Biblical hope is nearly the opposite: a confident expectation of good, resting on the character of a God whose will is firm as iron. He called it “faith in the future tense” (Piper, 1986). Entrepreneurs will recognize his next point. Hope is a reservoir from which we draw after a setback, like a sickness or a disappointing board meeting, so that we keep going instead of giving up. His prescription is three words from Psalm 42:5, preached to our own downcast souls: “Hope in God!”

Abraham is the original dasher. He “went out, not knowing where he was going” (Hebrews 11:8 ESV). Decades later, with no human reason left, “in hope he believed against hope,” fully convinced that God was able to do what He had promised (Romans 4:18, 21). His hope was not a mood. It was confidence in the One who made the promise.

Nehemiah dashed too, toward a ruined city with no wall. He prayed, surveyed the damage, secured the king’s backing, and assigned families to sections of the wall. When the mockers came, he answered, “The God of heaven will make us prosper, and we his servants will arise and build” (Nehemiah 2:20). For Nehemiah, trusting God and getting to work were the same act. Quiet builders like him are easy to overlook. Yet businesses with fewer than 20 employees created more than 525,000 jobs in 2025, more than any other group of private employers (Alin, 2026). Every one of those jobs began with someone who believed tomorrow was worth dashing into.

The clearest picture comes from Easter morning. After the worst weekend of their lives, Peter and John heard that the tomb was empty, and “both of them were running together” (John 20:4). They did not yet understand. They ran toward a possibility, and what they found was the risen Christ, the proof that no grave, no regime, and no election has ever unseated the One who reigns. The prophet had promised that “they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength . . . they shall run and not be weary” (Isaiah 40:31 ESV). The Hebrew word for wait there also means hope.

I do not know what you are anxious about this week. It may be the election, a struggling business, a diagnosis, or a child who has wandered. Wherever you are, the invitation is the same, and it is not to feel better first. The invitation is to “Dash into Hope!”

RC Sproul wrote that the New Testament uses nautical images frequently, like when it refers to the unstable as boats that have no anchor, tossed to and fro with every wind of doctrine (James 1:6-8). But to us, the writer of Hebrews challenges us to put our confidence in the certainty of God’s promises, saying that we “have fled for refuge” to a hope that is “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul” (Hebrews 6:18-19 ESV).

Tomorrow morning a bookstore owner in Malibu will unlock a door she once feared she would never open again. Michelle Pierce reminds us that we serve a God who is still on the throne, and that His refuge of hope is always open. So let us dash into it!

Sources:

Acton Institute. (2007). The Call of the Entrepreneur [Film].

Alin, M. (2026, June 1). Malibu bookstore owner honored for resilience after year of disasters. Santa Monica Daily Press.

EWTN News. (2025, December). Daughter of political prisoner Jimmy Lai speaks out for the first time. EWTN News.

NBC News. (2026, February 9). Hong Kong democracy activist Jimmy Lai sentenced to 20 years in prison for national security offenses. NBC News.

Palmer, K. (2026, April 23). Young voters squeezed by economy and distrust political systems in new poll. USA TODAY, via Reuters Connect and Bangor Daily News.

Piper, J. (1986, April 6). What is hope? Desiring God Ministries.

Sanders, L. (2026, February 10). What a new Gallup poll shows about the depth of Americans’ gloom. Associated Press, via OPB.

Sproul, R. C. (2025, January 6). The role of hope in the Christian life. Ligonier Ministries.