Apropos of an earlier blog post and comments on my blog, Danielle Bean responds to a reader who asks her about the internal struggle between being open to life and loving a big family while worrying about the challenges that a big family brings.
Danielle’s response is very good primer on the danger of the wrong attitude about NFP as well as how it helps with openness. She acknowledges that NFP is more difficult than simply popping a pill and requires some work, which often leads to couples ignoring certain signs.
I think that with NFP, there wind up being many “accidental” pregnancies that are not truly “accidents” at all. Couples often know when they are bending or breaking particular rules or not paying close enough attention to fertility symptoms and lo and behold—a pregnancy results!
This might lead to a great deal of frustration with NFP, but as I said, I think it is a good thing. NFP is not fun. This fact likely encourages many couples to be more generous in planning their families than they would otherwise be. The seriousness with which most couples learn and use NFP is usually directly proportional to the seriousness of their reasons for using it. Personally speaking, if conception did not come easily for us and my husband and I had to actively plan every single pregnancy in the way people using artificial birth control do, we might have 3 or 4 children by now. We surely wouldn’t be expecting our eighth. We would be missing out and wouldn’t even know it.
Be sure to read the whole thing (which is only a couple more paragraphs than I’ve quoted here).
The comments on the blog by her readers are hit and miss, but she does highlight one particularly good one.
The kids have taught me so much about God. My 5 year old insisted on giving me a toonie ($2 Cdn. coin) for my birthday. I knew this was half of her entire savings. At first I didn’t want to take it from her but she insisted. I took it and said to myself, I’ll just find a way to give it back to her. And since she was so generous I would give her back $5. It took a while to sink in but I realized this is how God takes care of us. What father would not repay his generous child? Since that day I no longer worry. If we generously turn everything over to God, He will provide for us in abundance.
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