CAN GOD BE TRUSTED?The Example of Large Families

[Denise]

CAN GOD BE TRUSTED?
The Example of Large Families
By Nancy Harvey

Nancy Harvey died on July 23, 2001, of complications from pneumonia and kidney failure. A convert to Catholicism in 1996, her writings appeared in First Things and Human Life Review.

"It's silly to believe that birth control is wrong -- as silly as believing it's wrong to eat oranges." This was my first belief about birth control. It was so much a part of the culture, so accepted by all the good people at home and at church, that questioning it seemed ludicrous. Of course, we Protestants (as I was then) knew the Catholic Church was against it, but as far as we knew, only so there would be more Catholics.

In college I went to Bible studies with devout Christians. "How should we then live?" was the question. What would God have us do about the details of our lives -- the rude roommate, the pressure to cheat, the professor who ridiculed Christianity? What should we study, and what jobs would allow us to best serve God with our talents? Since we were single and chaste, we did not discuss birth control. That could wait for a later stage of life. Yet once I was at that stage, in Bible studies with married Christians, the topic never came up. God was Lord of our lives, but He never intruded into the bedroom. It was taken for granted that two children, two years apart, was the leading of the Holy Spirit -- the responsible way to live.

Then my husband and I met a Presbyterian pastor who was going to let God plan his family. He married a woman with the same goal, and over the years, we watched the children arrive (eight at last count). On a mid-range pastor's salary, he supports his family. His wife teaches them at home -- a job that uses both creativity and intellect to the fullest extent.

Whenever I visit, the benefits of a large family -- and the beauty of children -- stare me in the face, with sparkling grey eyes, gentle brown eyes, and lively blue eyes.

As a former public school teacher, I can't help noticing that these children are far ahead of daycare, public school, and TV-nourished kids in the areas of self-control, responsibility, attention span, intellectual curiosity, problem-solving, reading level, and others too numerous to mention.

The spiritual benefits are even more evident. It is very difficult for a child in a large family to believe he is the center of the universe. The 14-year-old sees the need for loving discipline as he watches the tantrums of the two-year-old.

The children have something better than "self-esteem." They develop self-respect as they see that their help is essential to the family. The children help fix the meals and clean up, pick up after themselves, do laundry, and care for one another as a matter of course, without nagging. I once saw the toddler heading toward a fan, but before I could move, the five-year-old had leapt to his feet, dashed across the room, turned her around with a gentle "no, no, Lizzie," and distracted her with a toy.

There is conflict, of course: The children fight and squabble over who gets his way. In the process, they learn to forgive, to deal with anger and jealousy, and to live with other people's personalities and elbows.

But the most intriguing thing is to look at the children and realize that if their parents were like most Christians, Suzannah, with her engaging smile and cheerful disposition, would not exist. Neither would Sarah, with her melting brown eyes; or Samuel, who looks at the world with delight; or John, with his shy grin; or little Joannah.

Two, perhaps three, children are allowed into the average Christian family, but more are often not welcome. Those who use birth control and say they are "open to life" are not open to children, however they may feel about "life" in the abstract.

I have spent my working life as a teacher in small towns in the Bible Belt, surrounded by people who go regularly to conservative and fundamentalist churches. Yet many of their remarks about children could come straight from the mouths of worldly East-Coast liberals. Hear the grandmother, upset at the arrival of a third child into a happy, stable family: "This was not planned! I'll have you know this was not planned!" she told everyone who would listen. Hear the healthcare professional, a devout Pentecostal, who had been asked to go on a medical mission to Central America: "They should just sterilize all those people," he told me. "That's what they really need." And there's the youth director who asked for a raise because his wife was expecting their fourth child. I was in the congregational meeting when he was told he shouldn't have had so many children and was promptly fired.

One April day I sat in the teachers' lounge and listened to a group of teachers -- Christians all -- wagging their heads and criticizing a co-worker: "she'll be sorry," "she'll find out the hard way," "she's throwing away something she'll regret," "it's really not the best thing for her child." The teacher under fire was happily married, pregnant, and had just refused a contract for the next school year so she could stay at home and care for her new baby.

Why conservative Christians should discuss children in a tone of voice usually reserved for cockroaches is a puzzle, but those with large families can tell of similar unkind remarks -- from members of their churches. David Currie writes that when his wife was pregnant with their sixth child, one of the pastors at his church insisted on taking him in for a vasectomy, an offer Currie declined.

Our friend with eight children has heard similar remarks. "Five? Isn't that overdoing it?" "Six? Isn't that a bit much?" A Catholic woman actually said to me, "When is she going to quit?" Children, so the thinking goes, are things we produce. God is not involved.

Birth control has shaped this view. It encourages us to believe that the family is our turf. God is Lord of our lives, so we say, but bringing new souls into the world is none of His business. We make that decision, justifying our behavior by claiming that all the people who use birth control can't be wrong, an argument we would never use about divorce, abortion, or slavery.

Or perhaps we say that we are simply using the wisdom God has given us to prevent life in order to plan our family. We cannot trust the Lord, the Giver of Life, to prevent it, so we must help Him out.

But no conservative Protestant denies that man is fallen. Therefore, human wisdom cannot always be trusted. It is natural, in our society, for fallen man to choose Mammon over children, but it is not right. When we choose Mammon, we are assuming that God will not supply all our needs, that He will not give us a life that satisfies our deepest longings -- unless we prevent children from coming into our family.

Of course, letting God bring the children He wants into the family is difficult. "Suffer the little children to come unto me" does involve suffering -- from the aches of pregnancy and the pains of birth to those horrible days when ten people with the stomach flu are fighting for two bathrooms.

A large family requires the sort of faith in God that a mountain climber has in his rope, and if the fruits of the Spirit are not yet evident in the parents' lives, they surely will ripen, especially in long-suffering, self-control, and charity.

When anyone mentions Natural Family Planning, many Christians are puzzled. It seems simply a more troublesome, less reliable form of birth control.

Most of us, however, are not puzzled when we look at other bodily functions, such as digestion. We see the error of eating and then preventing digestion with induced vomiting (as was done in pagan Rome, so as to be able to continue eating and feasting). We hardly need to consider Natural Law arguments or Scripture verses to be able to say that it is wrong to use food in this way -- i.e., for the sheer (or mere) enjoyment of the taste.

So it is with Natural Family Planning, which is, to be blunt, a natural sex diet. Those who practice it do not try to get the pleasure of sex while physically blocking the advent of a child. They wait to co-operate with the body's natural infertile periods. They submit to the way God has designed the body. This leads to one of those "lose your life and find it" paradoxes. Those who practice Natural Family Planning report that both the marriage, and the marriage act, are enhanced.

Of course, the number of children in a family is not the sort of thing one Christian can decide for another. But if God is to be Lord of our lives in truth, we cannot simply accept the two kids/two jobs/paid childcare scenario. Christians need to re-think birth control. Above all, we need to re-think children -- whose they are, why they exist, and whether anything else we can possibly choose is more important.

If Jesus really does love the little children, if He asks the children to come unto Him, then those adults who are called by His Name should consider whether they ought to be so concerned with forbidding the little ones not merely from coming unto Jesus, but from even existing in the first place.

[Johnna]

Wow, this article is excellent! So many things jumped out at me, the first of which was the following.

Those who use birth control and say they are "open to life" are not open to children, however they may feel about "life" in the abstract.

How many people do this and think all is well? It is an issue that many struggle with, and many more SHOULD be struggling with as opposed to passively accepting.