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Barbara Rainey mentors women in their most important relationships. She loves encouraging women to believe God and experience Him in every area of their lives.
Samantha: Barbara Rainey believes followers of Jesus should support life. Here she shares one way we can do that.
Barbara Rainey: The church has, for many, many years been very strongly pro-life, but we've not been equally pro-adoption. Adoption is God's idea. Adoption is a Christian response to the results of sin and depravity. See, the Bible doesn't command us believers to adopt, but it does command us to visit and care for the orphans in their distress, and for some of us that will mean choosing to adopt some of these orphans.
Samantha: Welcome to the Barbara Rainey Podcast from Ever Thine Home, where we’re dedicated to helping you experience God in your home. I’m so glad you’re joining us today!
Did you know? November is national adoption month! We want to spotlight adoption and foster care in this episode of the Barbara Rainey Podcast because caring for orphaned children is near and dear to Barbara's heart. As she’s about to share, one of their six was adopted shortly after birth, and she considers it a huge privilege.
Some years back, Dennis and Barbara were asked to speak at their home church in Little Rock, on God’s heart for the orphan.
Their perspective is just as relevant and helpful today as it was the day they gave this message, because adoption and foster care have been a focus for decades. Actually for over 40 years, Dennis and Barbara have been actively involved in this arena. They’ve included their whole family in caring for the fatherless.
We’ll hear first from Dennis, then Barbara joins him on the platform.
Dennis: Barbara and I have been given the opportunity and the privilege to speak on behalf of the helpless – orphans. And if you want to get close to the orphan, you need to hear their voice, you need to look in their eyes and occasionally read their words.
"I hated my life since the third grade, when I was unmercifully beaten. I felt that life was lost and death was looking for me, and my tears were telling me that life was nothing in comparison with death. I felt like a little cockroach, which responds in fear when seen. A bunch of American people came to our school, and I thought these people wanted to laugh at us, but I was mistaken. They were people who wanted to give up the most precious gift a person can possess – love. Their intentions to share seemed strange, as they had their own children, but these people had such big hearts to give that there is still enough room even for us little cockroaches.
Emerging from a global crisis and world of civil war, HIV-AIDS, hepatitis, and natural disasters is a God-sized need. Millions of orphans, little boys, little girls, at risk, in danger, suffering unspeakable evils, horrors, and atrocities. They are growing up with no one to protect them; no one to provide the nourishing care of a mother or the sturdy love of a father. They are growing up without a family.
Just how big is this crisis? Well, we need only to look to UNICEF and their state-of-the-world's children report to look at the staggering numbers – 143 million orphans worldwide, nearly 88 million in Asia, over 43 million on the continent of Africa alone. In 2003, 16 million children were orphaned through HIV-related events. However, Americans have always had a big heart. Forty percent of us have thought about adopting, 81 million Americans have expressed an interest in adoption, they've considered adopting a child. Yet, the world's wealthiest nation with over 400,000 churches, adopts only 113,000 children annually.
What does God think about all this? This God that we just sang about cares about the least of these. God speaks of three different groups throughout Scripture with compassion – the alien, the widow, and the orphan. Let's look at some of those Scriptures and just quickly read them and get a glimpse of God's heart.
Hosea 15 – "For in you the orphan finds mercy." Psalm 10 – "You have been the helper of the orphan" – speaking of God. Deuteronomy 14:28, 29 – "At the end of every third year you shall bring out all the tithe of your produce in that year and shall deposit it in your town. The Levite, because he has no portion or inheritance among you, and the alien and the orphan and the widow who are in your town shall come and eat and satisfied in order that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hand, which you do." Proverbs 23:10, 11 – "Do not move the ancient boundary or go into the field of the fatherless. In Israel there were fields where they only went through and gathered the grain one time." They left additional grain for the widow, the alien, and the orphan. Why? Verse 11 – "For their Redeemer is strong. He will plead their case against you." Psalm 68:5 speaks of our Heavenly Father. He says, "A father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows Is God in His holy habitation.”
God is passionate about the needs of the fatherless. He values the orphan for two reasons. First, they are image-bearers, just like our children. They were made in the image of God, and that's why the orphan issue, the global crisis concerning orphans is ultimately a sanctity of life issue. But He is also passionate about the orphan because there is no father to protect them. He does not abandon the orphan, but He provides, He pursues, and He protects.
Would you really like to know what's pure Christianity in an age of scandals? Would you like to know what the real deal is? James says, "To visit orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world." Could it be that this church family needs the orphan as much as the orphan needs a family? I think so. It reminds us where we came from.
I'm going to ask Barbara to come on up and join me on the platform, and in your outlines we've given you five ways to obey His command to care for the orphan.
Barbara: The first of those five ways is this – plead with the Father for the fatherless. E. M. Bounds has said, "All Christian ministry is the result of someone's prayers." The millions of orphans in our world today need millions of believers who will pray for them, pray for their deliverance, pray for their protection, pray for their rescue, pray for believers to be moved on their behalf to go – to go and build orphanages, to go and care for them, to go and teach them of the love of Jesus Christ.
But there is another need for prayer that's not so far away as Africa or Asia or Russia or South America. There are families right here in this church who are following Jesus's command to care for the orphans and the least of these, and they need prayer support as they raise foster children and adopted children. Many of these children have special needs, both emotionally and physically, and they need someone to stand with them in prayer as they raise these kids. Prayer is one of the first things we can do for the orphan worldwide.
Dennis: There's a church in Brenham, Texas. Most of you know about Brenham, Texas, because you're fans, like I am, of Bluebell ice cream. But there's something going on in Brenham, Texas, much more important than Bluebell. It's the First Baptist Church of Brenham. This little church in Brenham, Texas, decided they would bring 29 orphans from an orphanage in Kazakhstan to their community. The only problem was, it was going to cost about $45,000, and so thinking somehow that FamilyLife and our ministry to orphans, "Hope for Orphans" had some money, they called us, and we said, "We don't have any money to bring them over. Pray, ask God."
Well, pray they did. God not only supplied the $45,000 to bring all 29 to visit them, but in the weeks that they were there, they found a home for all 29 children, most of which were adopted in their church. But they didn't stop there. I just called this past week to find out, and it looks like, by the end of this year, they will have adopted 41 children, most of whom are from that single orphanage in a church of 800 people. Would you like to visit their youth group?
[applause]
They didn't stop just with the orphan, though – they adopted orphanages. They've gone to Colombia in South America, and I heard just this past week that that little church brought back 25 pictures of 25 girls who need a forever family. They've already found homes for four of them.
I believe prayer is where we need to start, but it doesn't need to stop there. A second way we need to respond and be obedient to God's command to care for the orphan is we need to find ways to go near orphans. I already shared this passage earlier – John 14:18 – Jesus modeled how we are to go near. He said, "I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you."
I love what Alexander Solzhenitsyn says about going near. He said, "There are two standards by which we judge events – near and far. If it's near to us, we care about it. If it's afar and happening on the other side of the world, we have difficulty working up concern about it." It's time for us to go near. It's time for us to peer into the faces of the little girls and little boys and to hold them on our lap and hug them and put shoes and socks on them.
Barbara: One of our values of the family, as Dennis and I were raising our children, was that of taking our kids on international mission trips. We didn't want our children to grow up and see only American Christianity. We felt that sometimes American Christianity is tainted by our prosperity, and it's dulled somewhat by our ease and our affluence, while believers in other cultures are often much more vibrant, much more joyful, much more grateful for the little that they have, and we wanted our kids to see that.
And so we began to take them on international mission trips. Starting in 1989, Dennis took the kids – the older three kids on the first one. They went to China, Singapore, and Korea, and then in 1997 I took our younger three to Russia for two weeks where we visited orphanages and delivered food and Bibles and sang songs to these kids and held them in our laps and loved on them for two weeks. It was a great experience.
We went back a few years later, back to Russia, and since then we've made several trips to China. In fact, our youngest, Laura, just got back from her fourth trip to China. So she's really caught the bug of international travel.
Dennis: I just want to stop here. I want to brag on Laura. She took her summer vacation and went and lived in an orphanage where there were no screens, caring for over 30 street kids. She had bites from fleas, mosquitoes, there was no air conditioning and who knows what she ate, but she went, and she's continued to go. And I think that's the heart of what we're talking about.
[applause]
Barbara: On our second trip to China in 2004, Laura and I were part of a team of doctors and nurses. We spent a week in the city of Tianjin, which is a city of millions of people, in China, giving each of the – over 300 children in just one orphanage, medical exams. They were evaluated, and we began to make charts and keep records for all of these kids, because they'd never been treated medically.
All the non-medical people on our team were assigned each to a doctor as an assistant. Laura worked with Dr. Paul, who was a neonatologist, and they weighed and measured and took vital statistics on every child in that orphanage.
But there were two of us in our group who were sort of leftovers. We weren't assigned to a specific doctor, and we didn't have a specific job, and so we eagerly, actually, asked if we could just go into the baby room, and could we just hold babies all day every day, and they said "Yes." And so we did.
We held babies with cleft palates who had not had surgery yet. We held babies who had heart conditions and who probably weren't going to live. We held babies who seemed perfectly normal.
But there was one little tiny baby that I couldn't stay away from. She was so little, like a brand-newborn baby that I couldn't just let her lay in her crib, so I held her as often as the workers would let me, and I began to worry about her. She didn't each much when they fed her because as soon as she quit eating, they would lay her back down again, and I knew she needed more.
When her turn came the next day to be weighed and evaluated, I followed her over to the clinic like a mother hen to wait anxiously for the results. She weighed five pounds, and she was six weeks old. By now, my friend and I, Lynn, had named her Sarah.
The next day our group went to another town to do some evaluation on another group of children, but when we got back to the orphanage that afternoon, Lynn and I made a beeline for the baby room. We had to go check up on our little babies. I went straight to Sarah's little crib, and even though the room was very dark, as it was every day, I bent over that little crib, and I could tell immediately that something was wrong. Little Sarah was turning blue, and she wasn't breathing very well.
I picked her up, got the workers' attention, the workers grabbed her from me and rushed off. We went and got the doctors, including Dr. Paul, who managed to intercept her, got her to a hospital, resuscitated her and hooked her up to an IV. Before we left the orphanage at the end of that trip, Little Sarah was still in the hospital, but we knew she was going to live, and we were relieved. We also managed to get her vital information including her Chinese name and date of birth. We wanted to keep track of her after we'd come back to the States, and we also hoped and prayed that someday somebody might adopt her.
Sarah is now the daughter of Dr. Paul, the neonatologist who saved her life, and she lives in Texas.
Dennis: There is a third way that we can obey God, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, but it's give sacrificially. There are plenty of us who may be too old to adopt, and maybe not have the ability to go, but we can give. We can be a part of being tethered financially to the orphan community. Maybe it's to an orphanage, maybe it's to a child. I'd like to encourage you to consider funding a child as a family through a relief organization. Just make sure that that relief organization is a member of the ECFA, the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. It's the stamp of approval that your dollars are going to be used for their intended purpose.
We did this a number of years ago, in fact, gave up a meal once a month when the kids were little and ate rice and took the money that we would have spent on that meal to sponsor a child in another country. Maybe you need to come alongside an orphanage, financially consider supporting them, an adoption agency, a crisis pregnancy center, or a ministry that is an advocate for orphans. And I'd like to challenge this body with yet another thought. There is a new kind of church emerging across the country that has a heart for the orphan and wants to pay 100 percent of the adoption expenses for any family that wants to adopt.
John Piper and his church at Bethlehem Baptist in Minnesota has got a huge heart for the orphan, and there are others like him. Some of them have seen literally hundreds of orphans adopted through their church, and it's cost the adoptive family nothing financially. Give sacrificially.
The fourth way that we have to obey our Heavenly Father's command to care for the orphan is to help empty the state's foster care system. I want to introduce you to a couple who didn't empty the system but who are, indeed, foster care heroes. They have been quietly performing pure religion by caring for the needs of the orphans.
They have a son and two daughters, one daughter who is blind and the other who came to them while they had four other children on Easter, but they decided they could take one more. She was supposed to have stayed only three or four days but instead she stayed three years. And then they adopted her. Her name is Sarah.
Eighty percent newborns, one after another, they kept taking care of them. They gave the boys a blue Bible and the girls a pink one. Who knows where those Bibles have ended up! Eighty-two children from the foster care system. To me, that is pure and undefiled religion. Would you all stand up? Ann, Charlie, Cookie.
[applause]
One last thought before we get to our final point – there are 415 adoptable children in the foster care system in the state of Arkansas. What if this church and a couple dozen others decided to empty that out? Do you think that's a noble cause that we ought to consider as a Christian community?
There is one last way we can get involved.
Barbara: Number five is become pro-life and pro-adoption. The church has, for many, many years been very strongly pro-life, but we've not been equally pro-adoption. Alvin J. Schmidt writes in his book Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization that in the first century, infanticide, which is the killing of newborn infants, was very widespread. But the Christians, the new believers, in the first century after Christ opposed this practice as their response to honor God's command against murder.
They also practiced Romans 12:2, which says, "Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." And so they frequently took in these castaway children into their homes and adopted them. They saw child abandonment as a form of murder. Adoption is a Christian response to the results of sin and depravity. Adoption, as we've already talked about, is God's idea.
As a teenager, I dreamed of adopting a child someday, but after Dennis and I got married, we soon began having children, and we realized in several short years that we didn't have much trouble getting pregnant. So we didn't talk much about adoption in those early years.
Dennis: And, frankly, I'd never thought about adoption in my entire life until I married her.
Barbara: But after eight years and four children, we still wanted to expand our family, but I wasn't – I just wasn't interested in getting pregnant again, and so we talked about adoption, and we decided we would see if God might add to our family through that avenue.
Dennis: And we kept talking about adoption.
Barbara: Yeah. One day in 1983 we got a call. There was a baby available if we were still interested, and we were, and so our adoption journey began. This is a photo of the day that she came home, and this is a photo of her with me and one of our sweet little daughter with her daddy.
Because she had a mommy and a daddy and a stable home, she knows what marriage and family is supposed to look like. She knows the basics of how to be a mother and a wife. She, most importantly, knows Jesus Christ as her Savior and Lord. You see, adoption is another form of evangelism. It's the way we, as the church, the family of God, can reach out to children's lives around the world and introduce them to the Gospel of Christ. Solving the problem of orphans is challenging, but adoption is one of the solutions.
Secondly, adoption is the normal Christian life. God adopts us lost children into His family, and He puts us where we can learn of Him and His ways.
And, number three, adoption should only be done if God calls you to do it. See, the Bible doesn't command us, as believers, to adopt, but it does command us to visit and care for the orphans in their distress and, for some of us, that will mean choosing to adopt some of these orphans.
For Dennis and I, raising an adopted daughter has been one of the greatest blessings of our lives. It has also been one of the greatest challenges. Without Deborah, our lives would have been insulated, predictable, and safe. Without Deborah, we would have not understood God's heart of love and compassion for the lost and the lonely – the orphan and the fatherless. Without Deborah, we would have missed on our lives and on our family's lives the touch of God's hand, the touch of the Master's hand.
Our adoption story is not a fairy tale. Most adoptions aren't. God's adoption story of us is not a fairy tale, either. Most of us have wandered from his love; most of us have rebelled against Him and broken His heart. But the story is not finished. Until we reach heaven, there is much work to be done for the millions and millions of fatherless around the world, and it is God's adopted children, you and me, who must go and meet this need.
.
Samantha: We’ve been listening to Dennis and Barbara Rainey, speaking in Little Rock, Arkansas.
How about you? What step can you take in caring for the orphan? Pray about it. Ask God how He’d have you be involved. He may be calling you to adopt or be a foster parent. But He doesn’t call everyone to do that.
There are still other ways you can help meet the needs of the orphan:
You can give money to someone you know who’s in the process of adopting.
It may be that God is calling you to approach the leadership in your church to say, “I want to help start an orphan’s ministry in our church.”
Or maybe you’re positioned in such a way that you can support organizations that help couples adopt.
Dennis and Barbara are passionate about the Christian Alliance for Orphans, which works to bring together and invest in a variety of ministries and individuals. You can visit their website at cafo.org. Again, that’s the Christian Alliance for Orphans, cafo.org.
We have many adoption- and orphan-related resources available. Check them out at BarbaraRainey.Substack.com.
And while you’re there, make sure you subscribe to Barbara’s “Friends and Family” blog, as well. Check it out at BarbaraRainey.Substack.com
Thanks for listening today! I’m Samantha Keller, inviting you back next time, for The Barbara Rainey Podcast, from Ever Thine Home.