ST. LOUIS – One thought filled Jasper Rains’ prayers during his daily, one-hour drive to and from work in early 2007 – the thought of a baby boy who had been abandoned by his birth mother at the hospital.
The previous summer, after Jasper and his wife Kendra received Missouri state foster care licenses, the Missouri Baptist Children’s Home (MBCH) contacted them about this baby boy.
“The Children’s Home told us … that this may be our child,” Jasper, who now serves as minister of discipleship and administration at Parkway Baptist Church, St. Louis, recalled. “At that point, I started really praying Hannah’s prayer over him and saying, ‘God, if you give us this child, we’ll always give him back to You.’”
But after months of prayer and developing a love for an infant they hadn’t even met, the Rainses heard bad news. The Children’s Home placed the baby with another couple instead.
“This was a really devastating moment,” Rains said. “We had never experienced a miscarriage, but I feel like it was probably a similar feeling of loss at that time.”
Though discouraged, Jasper and Kendra turned again to prayer, committed to praising God no matter the circumstances.
Then, two weeks later, everything changed when Jasper received an email from the MBCH: The family who had been placed with the baby boy decided that, for some reason, they did not want to go through with the adoption. The baby could become a part of the Rains family, if Jasper and Kendra still wanted to adopt him.
Immediately, they said, “Yes,” and soon welcomed their son, Jackson, into their family.
Even now, Jasper often thinks of his daily drive to work, the long hours of prayer for a baby boy he hadn’t met. He tells Jackson, who is now 9 years old, “Before you knew I existed, I loved you and I was praying for you.”
Similarly, he said, God loved us—His adopted children—and sent Christ to die for us even when we were His enemies. “Constantly, I’m brought back to adoption as being a picture of the gospel.”
According to Jasper, life as an adoptive father has involved the full spectrum of parental duties and delights.
“My son is 1000 percent my son,” Jasper says. “He doesn’t look anything like me. But I’ll see other adopted families, and before I can stop myself, sometimes I think, ‘I wonder what it’s like to have a kid that isn’t yours.’ And I do, but Jackson has become such a part of who I am that I forget that he’s adopted. He’s an African American kid, and I’m a white guy. The world sees the difference there, but I don’t.”
About four years ago, the Rains’ passion for orphan care compelled them to begin praying about and working toward international adoption. During this process, they considered adopting from Haiti or from Ghana—a nation where Jasper had done mission work—but God helped them finally to settle on adopting from Uganda.
The need for orphan care in Uganda is overwhelming, he said. Nearly 2.7 million registered orphans live in the nation. “Missionaries have told us that the problem is even larger than that and that there are a lot of children that are undocumented, that are just street orphans.”
Just this month, Jasper and his family were contacted about adopting 6-year-old twin girls. After discussing it as a family, they said, “Yes,” and are continuing to raise the funds—tens of thousands of dollars, in fact—necessary to bring these children home from overseas.
The process of adopting internationally has provided opportunities for helping church members understand how they can be a part of orphan care. According to Jasper, churches around the nation have missed an opportunity to make an impact and live out the gospel by caring for the fatherless.
“The power that the church has that we’re not tapping into is amazing,” Jasper said, adding that Christians outnumber orphans 15 to 1. He noted that—to borrow a phrase he uses to mobilize people for missions –Christians can “pray, give and go” in order to care for orphans.
Jasper urges believers not only to pray and give of their time and finances to support orphan care, but also to consider seriously how they might go.
“In that prayer and in that giving,” he said, “be open to God doing something radically different than what you expected Him to do in your own family’s life.”
Missouri Baptists can follow the Rains family’s continuing effort to adopt internationally on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter by using the hashtag, #Rains2Uganda.