Nelu Nedelea sat in church staring at the ballpoint pen a visitor had just handed him. He had never owned such a nice pen. He had never owned a ballpoint pen at all. He looked at the logo printed on the side: Loma Linda University. Could I ever have a chance, the 14-year-old wondered, to walk on that campus where this pen came from?
Growing up in communist Romania, Nedelea only had access to pencils and fountain pens. Two years earlier, in 1989, violent protests had brought 42 years of communism to an end. When the news was shared, Nedelea and his classmates ran to the bakery, each buying a full loaf of bread and gleefully eating with free abandon. As he walked home, loaf of bread in hand, crumbs falling from his mouth, the older villagers cried, for they had never before seen a child eat a full loaf of bread.
Communism in Romania began after World War II, when the Soviet Union occupied the country. Private farms and businesses disappeared into state ownership, and ordinary families found themselves dependent on government-issued ration cards for basic necessities.
It was Nedelea’s job to get the family’s daily ration of milk and bread, enough for him to have two slices with each meal. With whatever change he had left over, he would ask the storekeeper for some cane sugar. The storekeeper would take a hammer to a block of sugar on the counter, smashing the large block as pieces of sugar flew all over the place. Then the brown sugar pieces would be weighed and wrapped in brown paper for the boy to savor. “That was my candy,” Nedelea says, “because I couldn’t afford candy.”
There was only one way to get candy. Go stand at the main road, the one that led from the west of Romania, crossing the southern part of the country near Nedelea’s village, and continuing on to the Black Sea, where foreign visitors loved to vacation.
Nedelea and his friends would wave as foreign cars drove by. Some passersby would throw candy out their car windows, sending the children scurrying in the grass and fighting to be the lucky one to retrieve the rare treat. But not all tourists were as kind. Some would prank the kids by wrapping a bottle cap in a candy wrapper, leaving the child who successfully retrieved it with nothing but disappointment.
A more predictable treat was oranges. They were only available at Christmas, and getting them required extraordinary effort.
On orange-getting day, Dad would wake his three boys at midnight so they could make a two-mile trek through the snow to the village train station. When the train arrived, the heated cars were already filled with passengers. A crumbling infrastructure meant most cars were not heated, and those that were had steam coming in through leaky pipes, which made it hard to see. Still, the Nedelea family would cram into one of the heated cars, and Dad would lift his boys up into the luggage racks, where, from the train’s 2 a.m. departure until its 6 a.m. arrival in Bucharest, they would sleep, nearly falling out of their makeshift beds every time the train came to a screeching stop.
When they arrived in the city, Dad and the boys would stand in a long line, chattering in the cold until they finally received what they had come for: a bag with four to six oranges. But there was a wonderful loophole. The oranges were not rationed by family but by person. Every person standing in line could take a bag of oranges. This is why, beginning at 5 or 6 years of age, the young Nedelea boys became an important part of this excursion. Before heading back home, they would pick up some city bread. Unlike bread in their village, bread in the city wasn’t rationed, so they could bring home several loaves. In addition, white bread was available in Bucharest, making for another special Christmas treat for the family. Once the bread was devoured and the oranges eaten, the family would dry the orange peels to make tea.
The exotic fruits, as Nedelea calls them, were so uncommon that Nedelea was 9 years old before he saw and ate his first banana. “I did not know what it was,” he says. There are stories of some children being so unfamiliar with oranges and bananas that they didn’t know how to eat them and would bite into the skin.
Another treat was ice cream, though there were only two flavors available: vanilla and one that resembled chocolate by having cacao powder mixed into it. The ice cream was sold in rectangular bars wrapped in a thin waxy paper, much like American butter sticks. It would often start melting as Nedelea ate it, the sticky substance dribbling down his arm. But Nedelea didn’t mind. He would drink the melted ice cream gleefully. “It was fun for children,” he remembers.
Limited choices defined Nedelea’s childhood. There was only one type of athletic shoe: Adidas, which came in black or white; one or two types of dress shoes in brown or black; and only two or three books in the whole neighborhood, which the neighbors rotated and shared. Nedelea read those books repeatedly, using candlelight due to electricity limitations.
Electricity was on for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. During those hours Nedelea’s mom would rush to get the family laundry done, using their communist washing machine that would shock her nearly every time she touched it. The hour of electricity was just enough time to get one load washed. The hour also provided an opportunity for the government to share propaganda in the form of an evening newscast.
The Nedeleas, however, had a secret weapon against propaganda: a hand-cranked radio, with which the family listened to Voice of Europe and Voice of America, stations that criticized the communist government and gave Nedelea’s family a glimpse of life outside of Romania. This was a carefully guarded family secret, however, because Nedelea knew if he told anyone about the radio, he might never see his parents again as they would likely be arrested and maybe even killed.
Such knowledge brought fright every time Nedelea saw a black Dacia. The only black cars in Romania belonged to Secret Service personnel and senior Communist Party officials. If a black Dacia rounded the bend, its distinctive license plate displaying a three-digit number, Nedelea would freeze in terror. Are they here for me? He would wonder. Are they here for my mom? For my dad? What’s going to happen?
Dreams of a Better Place
With the fall of communism, things slowly began to change. Blue jeans were imported from Turkey. Chewing gum became available. And Seventh-day Adventist neighbors were able to openly invite him to join them for Bible studies.
The Bible was no stranger to Nedelea. His mother would wake up early every morning to read the Bible alone. But what captivated him that night after he walked through the snow to his first Bible study only weeks after communism fell into history was the descriptions of the New Earth from the book of Revelation.
“As a child, my imagination just took off,” he says. “I could picture everything they were describing. It was beautiful. I wanted to keep going back. I wanted to learn more.”
When the BIble studies ended, Nedelea started attending the Adventist church. At 13 he decided he wanted to be baptized. The church had never had someone so young request baptism, so they sought out special permission from the conference. With approval, Nedelea was baptized as a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Though not Adventists themselves, Nedelea’s parents wanted him to be able to keep the Sabbath as his newfound faith directed. They decided that if he studied to be an electrician, that would give him more flexibility than working in a factory or another profession that would require Sabbath work. So at 14, they sent him to a vocational boarding school.
Nedelea hated it. There were gangs. There was violence. He couldn’t go to church. He had to eat pork. Nedelea prayed for a way to escape the environment he hated so much.
Then his mother had a dream that repeated itself three nights in a row. In the dream she was instructed to pull Nedelea out of vocational school and send him to an Adventist school. His parents did just that.
“I was embraced by Adventist educators,” says Nedelea, “who not only affirmed my Adventist values and worldview, but also taught me discipline and became my family away from home.”
After academy, Nedelea wanted to study to become a lawyer, but he was feeling discouraged by the difficult application process. At the church’s New Year’s party, he hoped to find a Bible promise to carry him through this challenging time.
It was a custom at his church to hold a special service on New Year’s Eve. After the service, each attendee would take a bookmark, on the back of which was written a unique Bible promise that has been added to the bookmark specifically for this event. Hundreds of promises were written on hundreds of bookmarks. This was a tradition that served as an anchoring moment in the church members’ journeys as they started a new year.
But when Nedelea turned his bookmark over that year, he was disappointed. It wasn’t a promise. It was a command, and an unusual one at that. “Ye have compassed this mountain long enough: turn you northward” (Deuteronomy 2:3, KJV).
Shortly after that, three different people, independent of each other, told him they sensed God was calling him to be a pastor. Now his New Year’s verse made sense. The seminary was north of their village. I will go north, he decided, and I will apply for the seminary.
At the age of 24, Nedelea graduated from the seminary and began pastoring in a six-church district. A year later he married Olivia. In 2009, he was ordained. Later that year, the young couple immigrated to Canada. Then Nedelea received a scholarship to attend Loma Linda University, the campus he had once only dreamed of walking on.
He’s With You
Graduating in 2016 with a Master of Science in chaplaincy, Nedelea did a one-year Mission Leader Residency before taking on the role of director of Mission Integration and Spiritual Care for Adventist Health.
Every day, he began and ended his work day with a simple prayer: God, use me and give me purpose in my ministry.
One day, he was asked to visit a middle-aged woman who was feeling anxious prior to surgery.
“I just want you to pray,” the woman told him.
“Before I pray,” he said, “help me understand a little bit about the need for prayer. What would you like me to pray for?”
After a 20- to 30-minute conversation, Nedelea held the woman’s hands as he brought her petitions before God. When the prayer finished, the woman was red-faced and teary-eyed. “He’s with you!” she said to Nedelea.
Thinking perhaps she had felt the presence of God through his prayer, Nedelea thanked her, but she kept insisting, “He’s here. He’s with you.”
Nedelea looked at her blankly.
“He’s standing right behind you.”
Ah, the medical team must have arrived, Nedelea thought. But when he looked behind him, no one was there. Now he was confused.
“I’m not sure I understand what you are seeing,” he said.
“Jesus is standing right next to you!” the woman exclaimed.
“How do you know?” Nedelea asked.
By this point the woman was shaking and sobbing. “Because I can see Him,” she said. “You are a good man. He is with you. He’s right here. He’s next to you.”
Nedelea wasn’t even sure what to say. Then recognizing how close in proximity they were to each other, Nedelea commented. “He’s standing next to you too.”
“I’ll never be worthy of God’s presence,” Nedelea says, remembering that moment. “God wasn’t there because I deserved it. It was because He chose to be there. He showed me that whether I am walking with God all the time or not, I know for sure that He is walking with me all the time.”
Filling the Container
In 2022, Nedelea became vice president of mission and ministry at Mercy, one of the largest Catholic health systems in the United States. He oversaw the work of 165 chaplains and more than 300 spiritual care volunteers across 55 hospitals. Here he had the opportunity to influence the culture, not only of his team, but of the entire 55,000-employee organization.
But after completing his doctorate two years ago, Nedelea started reevaluating how he was using the opportunity God had given him. He reflected on a book he had read nearly a decade earlier: Falling Upward by Richard Rohr.
In Falling Upward, Rohr asserts that there are two halves to a person’s life. In the first half they build their life’s container. They begin and grow in their career, get married, get a house, and have children. The second half, Rohr says, is for filling the container with things that have purpose and meaning, but most people get stuck building the container and never move on to filling it.
I’ve built a container, Nedelea thought. Now, where is the meaning and purpose to fill it?
One evening, Nedelea prayed, God, I’ve been waiting on You to do something in my life so I can feel holistically well, the best version of me as a dad, as a husband, professionally. There’s some things I’m satisfied with, but there’s something that’s not there.
Then a thought hit him like a punch in the face. It was so strong, he stopped his prayer and sat down: What if God is waiting on you?
“In reality,” Nedelea says of the insight he learned in that moment, “He was always ready. I was not.”
Rather than wondering what opportunity God might send next, Nedelea turned his attention inward. He began asking where he needed to grow—as a Christian, a husband, a father, and a leader. Instead of pursuing a destination, he devoted himself to becoming the kind of person prepared for whatever God might ask of him next.
He was not expecting to become a university president.
As a teenager it had been a wild dream to think that one day he might get to walk on the campus of an American Adventist University. Now he walks on such a campus, not as a guest or even as a student, but as its president.
It’s a role he doesn’t take lightly. “This is not a job,” he says. “This is not something that one should pursue. I think it is a calling and an invitation that requires a lot of discipline, a lot of commitment, and some sacrifices.”
And though he is new to higher education, he sees the journey God orchestrated as preparing him for this new chapter. “Growing up in Romania taught me resilience,” he says. “Ministry taught me compassion. Healthcare taught me how to lead large, complex organizations without losing sight of individual people. Higher education now allows me to combine all of those experiences.”
Recently Nedelea’s daughter asked him, “What does your name mean?”
He didn’t know, so he looked it up. Nelu in Romanian means “God is gracious.”
“And I can testify with all my heart,” Nedelea says, “and through all my life as I look back to where I came from—communism, poverty, working class parents, and a relatively large family—God has been gracious and faithful. All I needed to do is show up believing God. I showed up, and He did the rest.”
Preparing Students for a Lifetime of Purpose
Nelu Nedelea’s vision for Southwestern Adventist University (SWAU) begins with the university’s three longstanding pillars: knowledge, faith, and service.
“Knowledge gives competence, faith forms the character, and service gives purpose,” he says. Together, they engage the mind, heart, and hands, creating what he describes as a holistic approach to preparing younger generations.
Nedelea hopes to build on that foundation by helping SWAU become a spiritually rooted, mission-driven, innovation-focused university that integrates academic excellence, real-world experience, and lifelong learning. His goal is to develop graduates who are intellectually prepared, spiritually grounded, professionally excellent, and committed to serving God and humanity.
“We don’t simply prepare students for their first jobs,” Nedelea says. “We prepare them for a lifetime of purpose.”
That preparation must extend beyond the classroom, he says. Nedelea envisions expanding:
internships
undergraduate research
mentoring
entrepreneurship
community service partnerships with churches, healthcare organizations, government institutions, businesses, and other educational institutions
For Nedelea, enrollment is only the beginning of student success. He also wants to know whether students remain in their programs, complete their degrees, find meaningful employment, and leave the university better prepared for life.
“What happens to them once they leave the campus?” he asks. “Are they better off because of us?”
During his first year, Nedelea plans to listen, learn, build relationships, and begin implementing the board’s strategic vision. He wants to hear the stories of students, employees, alumni, church leaders, and community partners while learning the nuances of academic leadership.
His measure of success will be measured in the lives that are changed.
“Done right, education is transformational,” he says. “We want to be more than just an educational institution; we want to transform lives.”
