MY WIFE AND I LIVE in a comfortable neighborhood, in Vermont, near Dartmouth College, in a home we've owned for 18 years. It's hard to believe that about 30 years ago I was homeless, with a young family to care for.

My wife and I had traveled from New England to California with our one- and three-year-old daughters and just the possessions we could fit in our car. We'd been feeling somewhat adrift in our lives on the East Coast, the proverbial Americans going West to seek a better life. We went, however, not knowing where we would end up.

We arrived at the Pacific Ocean in the spring of 1980 and began looking earnestly for a home and a job. We were in our mid-20s. I had completed two years of college and had some metalworking skills, which I'd learned through a government program. But I also had something far more precious: a conviction that God would help me and keep us safe from harm.

This conviction came from a lifetime of connections between what I had learned about God and the good that came to me in my daily experience. For instance, when I was young, my parents would constantly turn to God in prayer, and both my sister and I had remarkable healings of childhood illnesses. I had already experienced the power of God, or Spirit, to overturn discordant situations. And during the birth of our first child, I felt prepared to be a support to my wife. As I prayed in the hospital, within minutes I felt a noticeable calm in the birthing room, helpful nursing staff arrived, and our daughter's arrival progressed more easily.

Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health that "all may avail themselves of God as 'a very present help in trouble'" (pp. 12–13). And she describes Love, God, as "the open fount which cries, 'Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters'" (p. 13). This thought was very helpful to me as we commenced our search for a job and a home in California. I felt certain that God would lead us to our right place.

As we searched for a home, we came to a little town in the Mojave Desert, looking for jobs and a place to live. We'd been living out of our car, and since it was springtime, each evening we'd find a public place to park and sleep in our sleeping bags in a park or in the open air. Our small savings had run out almost immediately, and we'd been receiving food from generous strangers. My wife was caring for the children and making sure they had enough to eat, but our situation seemed grim.

We continued to look for a place to live in that little town. After several days of fruitless effort, we found ourselves looking at an empty, run-down house with broken glass littering the yard. I thought, "The landlord would be glad to find someone to rent this place." Though it wasn't where I wanted to live, it seemed to be our last hope.

The landlords, a husband and wife, invited us into their living room, where we sat and chatted amiably together. Their pleasantness and desire to help us raised my hopes. Then they explained they had a rule against renting to someone who had no furniture to bring with them and politely but firmly ushered us out.

At first I was tempted to be angry at this stunning dismissal. Did they know what peaceful, well-meaning folk they had sent away from their house? And it felt like this was our last hope. We still had no jobs, no source of income, and no place to live, and at this point we'd been homeless for more than month.

Then immediately the words of Jesus came to me: "Love ye your enemies ... and ye shall be the children of the Highest" (Luke 6:35). Jesus' admonition is a specific instruction that enables us to experience more of God's help in trouble. As I understand it, we don't have to fear personal "enemies"; rather, an enemy is simply the idea of opposition, or something that claims to run counter to God's expression. We often grapple with some thought and get in a mental tussle over it. Should we hate ourselves because of this struggle? Or let go and move forward?

And what if our enemy should try to harm us? When Jesus rebuked those listening to his words in the synagogue and an angry mob brought him to a hilltop to throw him off it, he walked through their midst, unharmed (see Luke 4:16–32). God's power brings us protection from physical harm, but also from subservience to any idea that would claim to oppose divine harmony.

Soon, I stopped ruminating over the landlord's dismissal, and I just focused on loving them as I would love a friend or family member. Although it hurt to be turned away from the house, I realized that I could love unconditionally, as Jesus taught. Soon, the feeling of being hurt vanished, and it was easy to see the landlords as they really were—polite, kind, generous people. I think this was easy because I had been reading the Bible; I felt confident that God would comfort and protect us.

During this time, I had also been reading the book of Acts in the Bible, which tells of the works performed by Jesus' Apostles. Like Jesus, who was the son of a carpenter, the Apostles had been common folk: fishermen, tax collectors. They were people Jesus had met on his walks as he was teaching. And they had followed him. They had learned man's spiritual nature and the love of God for them because they had seen it expressed in Jesus. As I read, for the first time in my life I saw the disciples as people just like me, with troubles that I could relate to. And they had overcome them by living as Jesus had taught them. So I tried to follow Jesus' example too, and loved those landlords unconditionally.

As I prayed, I immediately felt compelled to physically look in a particular direction, almost as if someone were turning my head. There was no one behind me. But I also felt that this was a divine message, and I asked myself, "What is God trying to show me?"

I realized then that I was looking across town in the direction of a lovely little cottage we'd visited the previous day that had seemed just ideal for us. But when we had asked the landlord about it, he said that it had already been rented. Now it was clear to me that we should go back to that cottage.

We went back to the landlord and knocked on his door. He answered the door and was astonished and perplexed to see us there. As it turned out, he explained to us, the man to whom he had rented the cottage was a no-show. What to do? He told us to come back later. When we returned the next day, the renter still had not shown up, and the landlord agreed to rent the cottage to us. That was where we made our home for the next two-and-a-half years. My wife took care of the girls, and our elder daughter began kindergarten in that town.

A few days before that, in a parking lot next to the town green, I had been sitting in my car praying earnestly about a mistake I had made in my youth. I felt I had put popularity ahead of my faith, and there in that desert town in California I humbly prayed for a sense of forgiveness, knowing that I would always rely on God for healing from then on. Just then, a stranger came up and offered me some tires he was throwing away. Then he told me that he had just quit his job at a metalworking shop. (He was planning on joining the circus!) He said I should go to the company where he'd just left, and that I would find a job there. Again, I had metalworking experience from the class I'd taken, so I did inquire there, and that was where I worked and earned a living while we lived in California.

We don't always know how God, our Father and Mother, will help us—we only know that He will, and that we must be open and obedient to His direction. I'm so grateful that my young family and I were sustained by divine harmony through this difficult period of homelessness and unemployment. "... progress is the law of God, whose law demands of us only what we can certainly fulfil" (Science and Health, p. 233). css