My freshman year of college was an interesting time. The year before, I had graduated at the top of my class and had been elected senior class president. Then I arrived at a university that was, let’s just say, challenging for me. There seemed to be geniuses and genetic superiority everywhere — people smarter, funnier, taller, more athletic, more musical, more artistic, better looking, and considerably better supplied with hair. It was a perfect opportunity for humility development.

Within that context, it should have been easier for me to become closer to God. And I did pray during that time. But most of my effort was spent trying to compensate for my worldly weaknesses. Not that smart — well, study harder. Not that attractive — well, work out more and buy nicer clothes. Not that popular — well, join a fraternity. Prematurely balding — well, mousse it up. Not that musical or artistic — well, take some classes to improve those things.

Across the board, I never caught up; and often it backfired — like when one of my fraternity brothers point-blank told me that I was the ugliest guy in the fraternity and when an English professor told me that I was nowhere in my poetry. Fertile ground for humility, but I kept sowing other stuff.

Before I moved into the fraternity house, I was in a dorm suite with five other guys. One of my suitemates was quieter than the rest. Often, he would be seen in very plain clothes and sandals and some professor-like glasses, and he looked like he exercised extreme discipline in the cafeteria. He would acknowledge everyone in a humble, but cordial way as he passed through our common room. My room was right across from his, which gave me a bit of an advantage in saying hi whenever he opened his door. I don’t remember his name, but let’s call him Zhi.

One day, I was working on a creative writing assignment. I had one of those 1980’s word-processing typewriters, where you could see and edit a whole line of text in a calculator-like display before committing it to the page. Despite this revolutionary capability, I often found myself leveraging its other amazing capability — whole-line erasing, where one-by-one, each letter was mechanically re-struck and rubbed out with a special tape. I can still hear that distinct strike-and-rub sound in my head.

Perhaps, across the hall, Zhi could hear that strike-and-rub sound quite well, too, because he emerged one day to offer me use of his Macintosh computer. He even set it up for me in my room. Zhi and I didn’t exactly form a bond around his computer, but it gave me a chance to say more than just hello to him every day.

Fast forward several weeks. Zhi saw me sitting alone in the common area — I can’t remember what I was doing there — and he stopped and faced me.

“You believe in God? You’re a Christian?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why do you believe?”

I had never been asked that before, and I hadn’t considered what I might say — especially to someone who wasn’t challenging the belief but simply wanted to understand. For Christians, moments like this are a golden opportunity to witness: here is someone with an open mind, reaching out, whom you could invite into a whole new way of seeing the world, powered by the model life and ultimate sacrifice of Jesus.

I’m not sure whether God would say that I squandered that opportunity or genuinely tried and fumbled. I don’t remember exactly how I responded, but it was probably something like I just do or It just feels right to me. I know that I shouldn’t be too hard on my younger self. Still, I look back on that moment with some regret.

Zhi’s question has had forty years to work on me. And over those years, it has slowly turned into a different question: how did believing get top billing in the first place? The earlier Gospels present Jesus as a sage, a servant, a healer — a model human being, living every moment in the image of God. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the word believe shows up only a dozen or so times each, and Jesus’s signature invitation is follow me.

By the time we reach the Gospel of John — and throughout Paul’s letters — the spotlight swings hard toward believing: whoever believes will not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16); confess and believe, and you will be saved (Romans 10:9). In John alone, the verb appears nearly a hundred times — and John, tellingly, never once uses the noun. Believing, for John, is something you do. Somewhere along the way, it became something we hold. Why?

We usually read the Eden story as a story of disobedience — a reading that tends to put our defenses up. But it can also be read as a story of lost trust and a breakdown in communication. The serpent’s first move was to question whether God could be trusted — Did God really say…? — and then to claim that God was holding back on the humans (Genesis 3:1–5).

Here is the part that bothers me: Adam and Eve never took the serpent’s claim to God. Nobody asked, Is it true — are you holding back on us? They simply moved their trust from the God who walked with them to a stranger with a theory. The woman saw that the tree was good, a delight to the eyes (3:6); they ate; their own eyes were opened (3:7) — and they stepped into a world where seeing is believing. We have been seeing with our own eyes ever since — including at the cross, where what looked to us like defeat would be seen quite differently by God — whose thoughts are not our thoughts and who identifies with the least of these.

A small scene in John’s Gospel reads like the beginning of a repair. When a skeptic named Nathanael scoffs that nothing good can come out of Nazareth, Philip doesn’t argue or prove; he meets Nathanael right where Eden left us and simply says, “Come and see” (John 1:46). But Philip himself had just received a fuller invitation — “Follow me” (1:43) — the kind that asks for trust before sight. And Nathanael did come and see; by the Gospel’s last chapter, he is there among the followers, meeting the risen Jesus on the shore (John 21:2) — his seeing turned into trusting, and his trusting into following.

Which brings us to a distinction worth keeping: believing that something is true — or that someone is special — is not the same as believing in something or someone. I believe that airplanes fly; I believe in aviation when I buckle myself into seat 24C. Even the demons, James tells us, believe that God is one — and shudder (James 2:19). The demons believe, but they don’t trust or follow.

The Greek behind both “faith” and “believe” — pistis the noun, pisteuō the verb — carries exactly this wider sense: trust, fidelity, faithfulness. Belief isn’t the destination. It’s the ignition.

But belief-that has one clear advantage: it’s easier. And as a dabbler, I can only wonder out loud. Were the sacrifices of the earliest church — that communal life in Acts, where believers sold their possessions and shared everything (Acts 2:44–45) — simply too hard, and folks needed an easier path? Did people have the hardest time believing the resurrection, so that the greatest challenge to the Jesus story became its greatest focus? Did our need to understand what might be beyond our understanding lead us to the realm of belief, when it should have led us to the realm of trust?

Even the famous “easy” of Jesus isn’t what we’ve made of it. When Jesus says that his yoke is easy and his burden is light (Matthew 11:28–30), the picture is a working animal. An easy yoke is a yoke that fits — shaped to the animal so it can do its work without being damaged by it. A light burden is a load that can be sustained for the long haul. The master is caring, and the work is matched to the worker — but there is still a yoke, and still an expectation of effort.

Which brings me to the J’easy button — my twist on the Staples® Easy Button, from Believing in Saving Jesus. (Feel free to just look at the pictures.) Press it once — I believe — and salvation is handled; the rest of life is freed up for our worldly concerns. (We might give the button a reassuring pat on Sundays.) Here is what the button costs us: it takes us beyond belief by leaving it behind — trusting that Heaven awaits us through Jesus without ever working through what through Jesus means. That was me at eighteen — button pressed early, matter settled — which is why Zhi’s question caught me so flat-footed.

So, at last, back to Zhi. If I could sit across from him in that common room one more time, I would finally have an answer.

“Why do you believe?”

Because I believe that living as Jesus taught us is the only way that we can save our world — and ourselves — from eventual ruin. It is the only way for us to be truly happy, and to see the world the way God intended us to see it: as Heaven on Earth, here and now. Jesus lived a life devoted to caring for others, free of worldly desires. If we all lived as he did, there would be no war and very little pollution, and life on earth would be sustainable for as long as nature allowed.

So, believing in Jesus — in this way — requires that we trust in him: that his way is the right path for humanity, even when it demands significant effort and sacrifice with no reward or relief in sight. Forty years in, I am still learning to trust him that far.

But Philip’s little invitation keeps working on me. Come and see really means follow me and observe for yourself — Philip had Nathanael follow him in order to see Jesus, hoping that Nathanael would then follow Jesus. With Philip so freshly called, that is a lot of following, with some seeing in between.

So, a harder question naturally arises: should I have invited Zhi to follow me to Jesus? In reality, I would have felt ill-prepared to lead the way — especially then, with my eyes fixed on all those worldly measuring sticks and with my mission to strike-and-rub all my imperfections off the page. And perhaps that is the lesson, and the twist. Now, it is easy to tell Zhi what I believe in. But it would have been much harder to lead the way, much harder to see this as Zhi’s and God’s open invitation to me.

And you may find this interesting, as I just now remembered it 40 years later. The creative writing assignment I was typing the day Zhi first crossed the hall was a story entitled Lead Where They Will Follow. It is about a young king named Aprillion, who is trying to learn how to lead his people and trying to win their loyalty. On the surface, the story is about compromise and an easier path. But it isn’t an easier path. Aprillion’s wise advisor, Sagwadanen, tells him, “Loyalty is the louder side of ambivalence. It is their love that you must win.” If I had to rewrite those lines these 40 years later, I might have said “Loyalty and belief are the louder side of ambivalence. It is their love and trust that you must win — what wills them to walk the path that you lay out for them and to lead others down that same way.” But my old strike-and-rub typewriter couldn’t reach back that far in time.

Jesus led differently. He led where his people could not yet follow — and said so: “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward” (John 13:36). They scattered at the cross. And then he kept the invitation open until, transformed, they could. Perhaps that is why the Gospel of believing ends the way it does: back on that same shore, with the risen Jesus saying — twice — Follow me (John 21:19, 22).

And so the real invitation finally comes into view — the one Zhi left open forty years ago, and the one that is still open today. It is an invitation beyond seeing and believing, through following and leading, through loving and saving, to Heaven on Earth, here and now. Follow, here and now, where he leads.