Crowd Control

I was talking to a friend the other day about the second baby boom that has apparently hit our local church. In the past two years, she said, upwards of around 20 babies have been born, either into the church or to people that used to attend and moved away. 20 babies! That's no insignificant number...that's what we in the pros refer to as a 'trend'. Note- I am not actually a professional in any field that would refer to anything as a 'trend', and in fact I'm not even sure 20 is enough to qualify as an actual trend. For the sake of my blog, though, we shall assume that I am awesome and am totally telling the truth.

Before I commence further, I should probably back up a little bit and tell you the Parks family philosophy on birth control...since that's actually what this blog is about. And I will do that in fairy tale form....

(The periods represent the fading of our current, present state into the much brighter and softer world of The Fairy Tale)

(Oh, and the italics represent my voice becoming much deeper, with a sort of silky smooth tone)

Once upon a time there was a young couple named Jason and Sara.
Jason and Sara were cool people, but they were young and naive.
When they talked about having children, they smiled and said 'We will trust God'.

Little did they know that God's first command to humans was 'Be fruitful and multiply', which apparently has nothing to do with agriculture or mathematics.

So one day, early on in their marriage, Sara woke up and was pregnant. And Jason and Sara continued to eat fruit and do their math. Some time later, Sara woke up and was pregnant again. Then Jason and Sara realized the true meaning of fruit and multiplication.

The End.

And so it was that we decided that we were not going to be passive in this process. Understand that we hold nothing against those that are- some people like to get pregnant and have children. That is fine- for them. Not for us though. Not right now. When I told my friend our birth control philosophy (not in fairy tale form though :( ) she jokingly told me that maybe it was a faith issue. So then naturally my brain wheels started turning.

To me, this is not as spiritual of an issue as some people think it is. In Scripture, the first recorded commandment is 'Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it' (Genesis 1:28). But this wasn't just an empty statement- He also created humanity with the means to accomplish this task. (Puts on adult hat) (wait a minute sickos, not that adult hat) We can put all the spiritual spin on this that we want, but at the end of the day, procreation involves action in the physical realm. Sex=babies. Males produce sperm. Females produce eggs. Males get the sperm to the eggs. Then fruitful multiplication begins.

We are playing within the confines of a very structured system that God has made. God wants us to procreate. He gave us the means and the desire to do so- biologically, we (like all animals) have a drive to further our species existence. Socially, we want to create a legacy through our children.

Another thing to keep in mind- if God said those same words that He is recorded as saying in Genesis, He was saying them to Adam and Eve. The only two people on Earth! Of course they need to go forth and multiply- otherwise the human race would have died out before it got started. And then whose blog would you read?

There is definitely no need to populate the Earth at this point- if anything, we need to slow down the population process. We're already too big for this planet, and consuming our already overly stretched resources at an alarming rate. Yes, children are a blessing from the Lord- but what if we can't bless them? What if we bring them into a world that cannot support them? There is a hierarchy of needs- and the bottom level is food, water, and shelter. If there's too many humans, then there isn't going to be enough of those things.

I don't want to say "Do this, don't do that"- I do think that these are decisions that need to be made by the couple themselves. Obviously we don't want to all stop having children- there needs to be a balance between the birth and death rates. But we do need to be mindful of how many people our planet can sustain and how many children we can really give our undivided love and affection to.

And for us right now, that number is 'two'.