When they first married, Tom and Misty Mealey used artificial birth control and were not at all what you would consider a religious couple. Tom was an agnostic and Misty an atheist. But the hormonal birth control the used had side effects, and their eyes were opened to Natural Family Planning (NFP).
“I was suspicious of all the ‘hocus pocus’ involving thermometers at o’ dark-thirty in the morning,” Tom related. “That would all change in surprising ways once we got into living the NFP lifestyle,” he said. Having their first child, and the couple’s study of the Theology of the Body changed their thinking to a new way of life.
In an article, “Be Her Joseph,” Tom relates that when they had their first child, “we realized the Holy Spirit had already led us into a Catholic life. Even after our conversion, however, NFP grew our relationship with each other and with God in ways we never expected.”
NFP Strengthened Marriage
Learning and practicing NFP changed Tom’s perspective of his marriage. He said he was surprised to learn how grateful his wife was that he was willing to learn how her body worked. He said that he now shared the family planning responsibility and found non-sexual ways of expressing affection and intimacy when they had good reasons to postpone pregnancy. He said that NFP “strengthened our marriage and made me a better husband and father.”
Rather than subject his wife to the spiritual and physical consequences of contraception, a man can be another St. Joseph to his wife, he says, and “defend her virtue, body, and soul by using NFP.”
Classes in the Sympto-Thermal Method of Natural Family Planning are offered by the Couple to Couple League (CCL) to married and engaged couples, whether Catholic or not, and can be taken at 15 locations in the Archdiocese of Chicago, IL and surrounding area, including southeast Milwaukee and northwest Indiana. A homestudy course is also available at http://www.ccli.org.
The next series of classes in northeast Illinois will begin Fri., Jan. 29, 2010 at 7:30 pm at Holy Family Hospital in Des Plaines. To register, and for a list of classes, go to CCL Central at http://www.ccli.org. Or go to the Chicago CCL website at http://www.naturalfamilyplanningchicago.com/
