On our earthly pilgrimage, we often come to a point of decision where we must choose whether to go forward or back. This summer I came to such a point with writing this column. So many of you have kindly encouraged me at the grocery store, the library, or walking down the street that I decided not only to keep going but to kick it up a notch with a summer blog tour!

Over the next six weeks, six fellow members of the Redbud Writers Guild are scheduled to host Faith Notes as I share about “Trusting God When Life Hurts.” Then three friends will share their own experiences with trusting God before I wrap up the series at the end of August. Each week, I will introduce the featured host blogger so you can join along.

Why trusting God when life hurts? Because this has been a major struggle in my own life over the past four years. I hope that what I have learned will help you on your own journey. No, it hasn’t been easy, but few journeys that matter ever are.

Trusting God when life hurts, Act I

I never once felt as if my mother was dying. Perhaps she was trying to protect me, as my neighbor suggested. Perhaps I was in denial, despite knowing that the cancer had spread from her liver to her bones and that in such cases less than 2 percent of patients survive two years. Perhaps it was due to her abiding faith—and mine—that God would, or at least could, heal her.

Either way, last winter when I buckled in my 18-month-old son, Ezra, in his car seat to drive from my home in Maine to visit my mom in the Connecticut nursing home where she’d gone to recuperate from a small fracture, I had no idea that the next morning would be her last.

To read more, please follow along at Callie Glorioso Mays’s blog “This Glorious Maze.”