What stood out to me the most this week were the prophetic quotes regarding birth control. Having been raised Catholic, I still struggle with birth control. It’s something that has been ingrained in me and it’s been hard to shift my thinking to an LDS stance.
When we married, our original plan was to have children in five to seven years, but maybe even ten years, if work and travel were going well! Instead, we found ourselves with a honeymoon baby, the doctor using our wedding night as the date of conception. It completely threw us for a loop and I was even originally afraid to tell my husband! We decided we would have two babies as close in age as possible, then leave a large gap and the possibility for more children down the road. 13 years later, we have seven children and that “large gap” was two years and two months, ha!
Life hasn’t always been as easy as we originally planned and we certainly haven’t travelled the way I had intended...and I haven’t worked at all during our marriage! But it has been a huge blessing. Postponing children for work, school, or travel ended up not happening for us right off the bat, but our unexpected first baby helped pave a path where we were more easily able to keep that at bay.
I really appreciated the Ezra Taft Benson quote, “The first commandment given to man was to multiply and replenish the earth with children. That commandment have never been altered, modified, or cancelled. The Lord did not say to multiply and replenish the earth if it is convenient, or if you are wealthy, or after you have gotten your schooling, or when there is peace on earth, or until you have four children. The Bible says, ‘Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord...Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them…’ We believe God is glorified by having numerous children and a program of perfection for them. So also will God glorify that husband and wife who have a large posterity and who have tried to raise them up in righteousness.”
We live in Southern California, where two is the normal number of children most couples have, though three is acceptable if your first two were the same gender. When I was pregnant with my fourth baby, though, people began comparing us to the Duggar family. We are absolutely an anomaly with seven, even in LDS circles. I do not work and my husband is a police officer, so it’s not like we’re rolling in the dough in one of the nation’s most expensive places to live! However, our babies have each been a beautiful blessing to our lives and we wouldn’t trade any of them. Our pediatrician often reminds us that his patients will often say they wish they’d had more children, but that no one ever wishes they had fewer.
I’m grateful for the prophetic reminders that we are meant to bear children and raise them up unto the Lord, no matter what society tells us. I loved this reminder from J. Reuben Clark: Sex desire was planted in us in order to be sure that our bodies would be begotten to house the spirits; the pleasures of gratifications of the desire is an incident, not the primary purpose of the desire. Remember the prime purpose of sex desire is to beget children. Sex gratification must be had at that hazard.
I loved your story.
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