I was born in Romania in 1989, just nine months before the Communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu ended and the world learned of the horrors of Romanian orphanages. Between 1966 and 1989, up to 20,000 children died of neglect in squalid residential facilities.
I spent my first four years in one of these orphanages. I don’t remember much, but what I do remember is shrouded in terror.
Confined to the room where they put children with disabilities, I was daily told I was stupid and was physically abused. Sometimes the other children stole my daily ration, leaving me without food. There was always the sound of screaming and crying.
I still carry physical and emotional scars from those dark days.
In 1993, the organization SOS Children’s Villages, based in Austria, set up a new private orphanage in Bucharest. I was chosen as one of the children to be relocated there. Where my first orphanage had 50 children under the care of a single staff member, SOS’s cluster of 15 homes had just 7 children per house, with a dorm mother in each one.
Daily life improved for me drastically, but there were still many difficulties. For one, the dorm mothers never stayed for long. In a single year, we could have two or three different caretakers, who left because of burnout or career changes. For us children, these dorm mothers were the most important people in our lives, and each departure only served to harden our hearts further.
Romania is a deeply Eastern Orthodox country, so my first experiences of Christianity were Sunday services and the religion class at school, which all of us were required to participate in. I don’t recall ever reading Scripture on my own, but I learned to speak to God about my life and to search for him out of my desperation—though I did not learn to call him Father until much later.
All of us orphans wanted to know more about our families and our own painful pasts. So when I turned 12, I asked my caseworker to tell me the details of my family.
I learned I had two older half brothers, one of whom had been adopted and lived in the United States. Our mother had the mental capacity of a six-year-old, the caseworker told me, due to a severe childhood brain injury. I was born as the result of her being raped, and she abandoned me at birth. That was how a doctor had found me and placed me in the government-run orphanage. No one had ever found out who my biological father was.
As difficult as it was to learn about my past, my story was not unusual for those I grew up with. Still, learning about my past only made me feel my isolation and loneliness more keenly.
The Orphan Care Movement Grows Up
The years passed until I turned 18: the year when I was cast out into the world, alone.
On the Christmas Eve after I left the orphanage, I was walking through Bucharest, hoping to listen to some carols. I hoped that maybe, even for a moment, I could feel a little less alone and taste a bit of the Christmas spirit.
As I walked through the city, someone handed me a flyer for exactly what I had been looking for: a free Christmas carol concert. I had no idea it was organized by a Baptist church. I didn’t know much about it at all, but I decided to go anyway.
From the moment I walked into the building, I felt that something was different. It was very crowded, so I had to stand in the stairwell and listen as the music began. I had grown up with somber sounds in ancient words. But inside the church that night, God sang a new song over me that flooded into my heart.
When the carols ended, the pastor gave a ten-minute message about the meaning of the holiday. He spoke about the incarnate Son of God, and about how Bucharest’s famous Christmas pageantries were empty trappings—celebrations without the one we were celebrating.
The pastor’s message resonated deeply with me as the Holy Spirit stirred in my soul. My life story testified to the vulnerability of being a child in a cruel world. Yet it was into that very world that the infant Jesus came.
After that Christmas Eve concert, I started to attend the church regularly, sitting in the back row of the 400-person service. Each week, I felt a new wound heal as God’s Word began to transform my life. I no longer reacted angrily if someone caused me offense. I felt the real encouragement and love of a Father whose heart goes out especially to the fatherless.
So I kept coming, week after week, and gradually gave my life to Christ.
Still, being an orphan in Romania meant bearing the badge of shame, marking me as unfit to belong in society. I knew receiving an education was essential to my ability to find a job and support myself. I did not want to become another statistic, one more orphan to succumb to poverty or even suicide. Yet I had no money to enable me to afford college.
In the absence of an earthly father, my heavenly Father began to provide for me. I passed the college entrance exam and was accepted as an information technology (IT) major at Bucharest University of Economic Studies, but I wondered how I would ever be able to pay for it.
Unbeknownst to me, God was stirring the heart of a woman from the admissions board to pay for my tuition. For three consecutive nights, she felt God calling her to support me—even though she had only met me for five minutes during the admissions interview. Two days before the payment deadline, she called to tell me that she and her husband had decided to cover all financial costs for my studies.
After completing two master’s degrees and working for the World Bank, I launched my own IT and digital marketing company and partnered with many renowned brands, including the royal house of Romania and the Ministry of Education. The local press began to call me the “Mark Zuckerberg of Romania.”
But God’s provisions weren’t only material. One summer, I signed up to go to a camp organized by my church. Due to an oversight, I was left out of the car assignments—an unfortunate incident that almost kept me from going.
One of the pastors, Boingeanu Cornel, noticed what had happened and kindly offered me a seat in his car for the three-hour drive. That journey marked the beginning of a beautiful and lasting friendship. Today, he has become like a father to me.
Following Jesus does not mean we will necessarily be successful in this life, and the gospel does not promise wealth or health. But after I experienced so many years of abandonment and pain, God’s providential care in my life was—and still is—cause for loudest praise. I learned that I have a good Father who cares for me even in the most ordinary of ways.
As I grew in faith, I wanted to find ways to serve the God who loved me. I began to see how the darkness of my childhood had carved out a bigger well within me for compassion for others and a desire to be a witness. My heart ached for those who did not know Jesus Christ—especially young people—and I began to pray for a way to share his love.
The seed that was planted in my heart at that Christmas Eve service has since grown into the vision of HeartBeats Christian music festival, the largest of its kind in Eastern Europe. For the past three years, by nothing short of a miracle of God, HeartBeats has grown beyond Romania to Korea, Kenya, and Brazil, with over 500,000 attending in-person gatherings and many more joining via livestream in 2024.
Most importantly, through HeartBeats, thousands of young people around the world have found salvation in Jesus Christ as they worship and come to know our Father, just like I once did at a Christmas Eve concert in Bucharest.
I came to my Father’s house broken and empty. I came with nothing to lose and everything to gain for his sake—and he gave me everything.
Lucian Mustata is the founder and CEO of HeartBeats Festival and the web development company Lucian & Partners.
Sara Kyoungah White is an editor at Christianity Today.
