Adopted from 10 F-Words for the Faith-Driven Entrepreneur by Roland Heersink
FAITH – Part 1 of 10
Hebrews 11:1 puts it simply: faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. I didn’t fully understand that verse until I was building something with no guarantee it would work.
Starting Agape wasn’t a calculated bet with the odds stacked in my favor. It was building a company in a regulatory gray zone, in an industry most people don’t understand, with a supply chain, payment processors, and compliance requirements that changed under our feet more than once. There was no spreadsheet that could prove this would work. At some point, the only thing left to do was build anyway.
That’s what faith actually looks like in practice, not the absence of doubt, but moving forward while the doubt is still there.
What faith isn’t
It’s not recklessness. We didn’t skip due diligence because we “trusted God would work it out.” We spent months vetting testing labs, reviewing legal opinions, and rebuilding pricing models from scratch when we found errors. Faith didn’t replace the work, it’s what got me back to the desk the next morning after a deal fell through or a processor said no.
What faith is
It’s the decision to keep building something true, even when the fastest path forward would have meant cutting corners. Every COA we publish, every testing panel we run, every honest “here’s what we don’t know yet” moment on this site — that’s faith made practical. “Restored by Love. Fortified for Life” isn’t just a tagline; it’s the same principle Hebrews describes: conviction acted on before the proof arrives.
Where this series is headed
Faith is the foundation, but it’s not the whole picture. Over the next nine posts, we’ll walk through the rest — Failure, Fear, Focus, Finances, and more, each one a real piece of what it actually took to build this. Not polished hindsight. The parts that were hard while they were happening.
If you’re building something of your own right now, wherever you are in that process: the substance of things hoped for is still substance, even when you can’t see the finish line yet.
This series shares personal reflections on faith and entrepreneurship. It is not medical, financial, or business advice, and reflects one founder’s perspective and experience.
Agape Compounds Research Library 