Rodney Nielsen

Rodney D. Nielsen is the senior pastor of East Valley Pentecostal Church in San Jose, California, a congregation of twenty eight nationalities worshiping in English and Spanish. He has served in full time ministry for more than thirty years and is a bishop in the United Pentecostal Church International. He did not set out to write about grief. He set out to pastor people, and grief is what kept arriving. Over thirty two years he has lost count of the funerals. What he remembers is not the services. It is the rooms afterward, when the casseroles are gone and the last car has pulled out and somebody is sitting in a chair that suddenly has too much space around it. He has been the man in the other chair for most of his adult life. He has also been in the first chair. He has walked through the loss of his health, the collapse of everything he had built, the end of his marriage, and grief he did not expect to survive. That is why he writes the way he does. He is not offering a theory about suffering. He is describing a road he has been down. Early in ministry he said the things everyone says. That a husband was in a better place. That everything happens for a reason. He meant them, and he still believes most of them are true. What he has learned since is that a sentence can be true and still be the wrong sentence for that moment, and that the ministry in a grieving room is usually not the sentence at all. It is that somebody did not leave. His first book, You Will Smile Again: How God Restores Joy After Deep Pain and Heartbreak, releases October 20, 2026 from Overcomer Press. He writes at rodneydnielsen.com.

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