We can all use a hand from time to time.

When we are fortunate enough to get the help we want or need, there is often a sense of relief and gratitude. What we thought might be difficult or impossible is now made easy. In particularly dire situations, well-timed assistance can transform despair into hope.

There’s a potential downside to this. There is also danger.

For the last several weeks, we’ve been hosting family at Camp One. These extra and capable hands have been invaluable. Daily chores are more enjoyable, our opportunities to have errands run are greatly expanded, and conversations at the dinner table have broader perspective.

Soon, however, it will all come to an end.

These good people will slip back into their own, remote lives. Our home will become quieter, the work more taxing, with the daily stressors finding fewer necks and shoulders upon which to settle.

The downside of help is that we can’t always count on it. The danger is that we might come to expect it.

In many ways, Dust and Tribe exists to explore the opportunities and limits of help as it manifests through creation. What kind of help can we reasonably hope for? How do we receive that help with grace? How can we be helpful to others? What mindsets are required to make sure that the giving and receiving of help is sustainable over the long-term? How do we continue to recognize the Hand of God through all of this?

Our wilderness adventures were the perfect platform for a practical survey of these ideas, most particularly our Grind experience. But we’re not doing that anymore, and Camp One has now become our laboratory. It’s still too early and the help too inconsistent to come to any firm conclusions, but here’s what we think so far.

While assistance will only ever be mediated through creation, it is in fact God’s Help. This Divine Concern, this inayat, is always there. Our perception is limited, however, constrained by the finitude of our personal agendas. When help arrives to advance our agenda, we immediately recognize it and incur a debt of gratitude in response.

To that end we thank our family for all of their help. We pray that we have been good hosts. We hope to see them all again soon, insha Allah.

Thought their departure is imminent, God’s Help will remain. Admittedly, it will be harder to perceive. It may take the form of more work and quieter meals, but we will invest in the belief that this is what is necessary for us in this time. Our homestead cannot exclusively be about the stewardship of what is outside while ignoring the essential work of cultivating what is within.

God’s Help will allow us to refine the qualities that He has established as essential in the life of a believer: patience, resignation, resilience, fortitude, and stalwart persistence among them. These are not qualities attained through rescue. We cannot fundraise our way into improved character. Nobody can make us better through their work.

We pray that we will remember this as we transition back into a routine that does not involve the extra hands. We pray that God keep the expectation of help far from our hearts, such that we may be pleasantly surprised when it comes and free of disappointment when it doesn’t.

We ask further that He purges any resentments that fester within us as a consequence of our misplaced aspiration.

May God help us.