When we care deeply about an issue that others view differently, it’s often tempting to step in and try to help them see it from another perspective—from our perspective. And it can be hard to instead step back and trust God to care for that issue. But what does it even mean to entrust something to God? Surely it can’t mean doing nothing.

Recently I’ve been learning that a willful, fearful, or angry impulse to correct what I see as another’s misperception actually stems from a faulty concept of God and His creation. If we understand God to be all powerful and all good and that man is made in God’s image and likeness as the Bible teaches, then why would we believe that He has created an ignorant person whom we need to correct? Man is the perfect idea of the all-knowing divine Mind, Love itself. Could this Mind have an idea that does not express wisdom and compassion? 

In an article titled “Fallibility of Human Concepts,” Mary Baker Eddy writes: “If one asks me, Is my concept of you right? I reply, The human concept is always imperfect; relinquish your human concept of me, or of any one, and find the divine, and you have gained the right one—and never until then” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 353). And she goes on to encourage readers to trust God to govern His creation rather than trying to tend it ourselves.