About Pastor and Author Rodney D. Nielsen

Rodney has spent more than three decades as a pastor, sitting in living rooms, hospital rooms, and at gravesides, watching people walk through the worst moments of their lives. But the reason he wrote this book isn’t the pulpit. It’s the valley.

He has lost his health. He’s watched a lifetime of financial security disappear. He’s grieved losses that left him staring at the ceiling at night, asking God how life turned out this way, including the end of a marriage and a grief no parent is ever ready for. He learned, slowly and sometimes stubbornly, that God can be trusted in the middle of heartbreak, and that joy really does return.

For a number of years after his marriage ended, he raised two daughters as a full-time single father, learning to be both mom and dad on the hard days, leaning on God when he had nothing left. Then, in His timing and far beyond what he dared hope for, He gave him his wife, Jenale, and began rebuilding what he thought was gone for good.

That’s what makes Rodney’s perspective different: He’s not writing about pain from the outside. He’s writing as someone who has stood in the rubble, and as someone who can tell you, not as a slogan, but as a quiet, hard-won conviction: by the grace of God, you will smile again.