Trusting God With Your Fertility- Part 1

Brianna, this series of posts is for you.

This subject is something that I talked about alot a few years ago, but the Lord basically gave me a few years of living it without talking much about it except to those others that I had it in common with. By "it" I mean what is now called being "Quiverfull". It means that Jeromy and I don't use birth control of any kind and are trusting the Lord to plan our family the way He sees fit, whether we have 3 children or 20. It means that we trust that only the Lord knows our future- where we will live, how much money we will have, where Jeromy will work, our physical health, so only He can plan how our family should look.

I was asked to share how we came to this belief, and with much forethought, that is the purpose of this series of posts.

Jeromy and I did not come to this belief easily. It wasn't something that we grew up believing or brought into our marriage with us. A little history of us will be a good foundation to this discussion and will help to see how God got us to where we are now.

I grew up in a Christian home, went to a Christian school through 6th grade, then switched to public school. I was not saved, had never completely given my life to Christ, and didn't live a life that was pleasing to Him. I didn't make that decision until I was 22. Those years of living an unsaved life shaped my worldview and left me a pretty feministic, mainstream Christian. I had lived with a man I wasn't married to for 3 years, looked at having a child as a huge inconvenience at best, was very career focused, and didn't quite know how to mix all these things together with Christian living. A large number of churches these days are having the same struggle for identity (Biblical values vs. secular/watered-down Christianity), and I didn't receive much guidance. I did get to the point where I believed that I would one day have a family, after I established a career, and would even stay home until they went to school.

Jeromy didn't become a Christian until he was 25. He did have very rapid maturity in his Christian walk and was truly a seeker of God. He was so engrossed in the Word that I was embarrassed how much more he knew than I did, even though I had grown up hearing about the Bible. He wanted a wife and a family, but had the same feelings that I did about it. You get married, work a few years, get used to being married and then decide when you want to have a baby. We didn't know there was any other way. No one talked about God being in the equation at all. It wasn't a question of whether we should use birth control, but which one will work the best for us.

Jeromy and I got engaged when he was 30 and I was 24. We were both in college, each having at least 2 years left. No one said, "What happens if you get pregnant," or, "You shouldn't get married until you are ready to have kids." What we did get is counseling that asked us if we had decided on a method of birth control. Of course we had. I didn't want to have a baby, I just wanted to get married. I quickly went on the Pill and we got married 10 months after we had met.

Life was great, we were settling into married life when I picked up a pretty inconvenient book called, Does the Birth Control Pill Cause Abortions? by Randy Alcorn. I was on staff at the local Crisis Pregnancy Center as a counselor, and I had heard a little about the possibility but always quickly ignored it. I read the booklet in a day and knew I had a problem. The answer to that question is, YES, it can cause abortions. I am adamantly against abortion, so I had a definite problem on my hands.

The journey was about to begin.