You will smile again. Even if tonight you can’t see how. It’s 3 a.m. and the worst moment is playing again. You pray, you replay, you bargain, and in church on Sunday you smile like nothing happened. Hear this: you are not crazy, and you are not faithless. You are wounded. And you are seen. After 32 years of walking with people through their darkest nights, and surviving his own (losing his sight at twenty, a heart attack at thirty-eight, financial collapse, and the marital betrayal that broke his world), Rodney D. Nielsen wrote the book he wishes someone had handed him: not a memoir, not another pep talk, but a practical, biblical pathway out of pain. Whatever broke your heart (the grief no one sees, a betrayal you never imagined, shame that whispers you’re damaged goods, dreams that died quietly, even a church that left scars instead of healing), this book meets you in your wound and walks you home to joy: – Name your hurt honestly and stop faking fine – Escape the traps that keep hurting people stuck – Discover where God actually is when it hurts most – Practice daily habits that rebuild joy, step by step – Heal specific heartbreaks (betrayal, grief, broken relationships) with guided prayers and exercises God is close to the brokenhearted. Your story doesn’t end with pain, and you don’t have to walk out of it alone. For anyone hurting tonight, and a gift that says what you can’t find words for.

Rodney Nielsen

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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.