Openness to life offers the freedom of surrender and control working together.
With Natural Family Planning must come the understanding of openness to life. Earlier this week, we talked about practicing NFP. It can be found here: https://agapecatholicministries.info/family-life/practicing-nfp-natural-family-planning/ Yes, NFP is used to help achieve and avoid pregnancy. Spacing our children and being intentional with our conception is perfectly within the boundaries of God’s natural design. However, NFP can be practiced with a contraceptive mindset. We can chart our fertility and abstain from sex with the firm, unresolved intention of not having children. There is still the potential to look at our fertility as dangerous or undesirable, just as if we were on the pill or using condoms.
Openness to life is the mindset that we surrender our fertility to the Lord. We see children as a gift, and embrace that we can understand the responsibility of our nature. Contraception is like driving with horse blinders on your head. You have one goal, and you have to make it to that goal, and you don’t want to see anything else. Openness to life means seeing the whole road. You accept that you want to reach your destination, but you may hit the bumps or even crash along the way.
How can we surrender to and take control of something at the same time?
First, we need to recognize we are not in control of anything except our actions and attitudes. God created the world to work a certain way. The sun rises in the East, the seasons change, and we go through phases of fertility and infertility. We cannot will snow into existence every Christmas (not in Texas, anyway!). But, we can adjust our plans and expectations for how to enjoy the holiday season even when it’s 85 degrees outside. Refusing to surrender to the natural order God has designed does not gain us any amount of control over it.
Second, we need to surrender everything except our actions and attitudes. Openness to life means we accept we could have children even when we don’t “plan” them. We accept we are making decisions based on our fertility with the intention to either avoid or achieve pregnancy. However, we can chart incorrectly. Our bodies can exhibit signs that are not 100% accurate. We can decide one night to “risk” pregnancy and end up with a baby from that single chance.
What’s the benefit?
Well, what’s the alternative? The alternative to openness to life is, inevitably, a contraceptive mindset. It’s the mindset that we are doing X so Y has to the result. Whether it’s abstaining from sex to avoid or having sex to achieve. This is the mindset that leads to seeing fertility as a disease when you don’t want children. And seeing sex as a tool when you do.
The benefit of openness to life is that you can accept God’s will, no matter what it is. Many of my friends are struggling to conceive their first child. It’s hard, it’s emotional, it can be depressing. But they live with trust and faith that God will bless them in His time. My friends who have suffered miscarriages are unbelievably resilient and hopeful, because they saw their babies as gifts. They do not view children as a commodity they can choose one day and reject the next.
In March, I was not expecting to see two lines on the pregnancy test. I was expecting to determine I was sick with a stomach bug. But openness to life meant we laughed with joy instead of crying with regret. Had we been trying to perfectly control our pregnancies, I honestly do not know how we would have reacted. Not when we saw a positive test the same day our firstborn learned to crawl. Certainly not when we found out I was already in the second trimester.
Our free will comes with many responsibilities. But few are as critical as the responsibility to surrender and control our fertility.
