This is the sixth in a series of posts featuring some women’s experience with natural family planning. To read previous posts in this series, click here. To read the post that originally inspired this project, click here. To read about the purpose of and ground rules for this project, click here.
Julie’s Story
This issue has been one that I too have struggled with for years, as I desire to follow church teaching and yet have a chronic disease, Type 1 diabetes, that makes pregnancy a much more serious condition than it would otherwise be. After being blessed with the birth of my daughter (she is 4), I know I have not had the time and energy to pour into my health to make another pregnancy a healthy possibility. Therefore, I am one of those that ‘quietly don’t follow the magisterium” as Jonathan Post said.
As much as I try to have faith in our church leaders, the longer that I am married and experience what that relationship is all about, the more convicted I am that an unmarried man with no experience of a marriage relationship has any possible ability to truly understand the challenges faced in the marriage relationship and in raising children.
Because of this, I have sincerely changed my own tendency to judge priests, because I feel that I can only expect out of them what I wish they would expect out of me – a willingness to try and understand the other, without judgment, when both have the goal of growing closer to Christ and bringing others along with them.
But I grow weary from those who judge my choices without really understanding why I have had to make them. We cannot walk in someone else shoes. Those who are employing artificial means or birth control may be doing so for selfish reasons, but they also might not be.
