“First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage”. For many years little girls have sung this rhyme while pushing their toy prams.
Yet is it true anymore? On August 5 The Sunday Tasmanian featured an article on falling marriage rates, titled “To tie the knot or not”.
Increasingly, young couples are choosing to live together or date for many years before marrying. A Relationships Australia advisor even suggested that marrying young may not be a good idea.
“. . . adolescence seems to stretch out longer these days,” Chris Street said.
“A lot of individuals wouldn’t be ready for marriage.”
So first comes love, then comes dating for years, then comes living together. Then comes marriage if you are really, really ready and you think it might be a worthwhile commitment.
It seems that the baby carriage is also an unpopular item these days. Immediately following marriage, most couples think of anything but babies. If they do dare to want them, they are told that it is a really good idea to put them off at least a year or two.
After marriage, travel, careers, home loans and “getting to know each other” must come before a baby carriage.
While many Christians choose to marry young, fewer choose the baby carriage over careers and getting to know each other. Most people I know wait about four years before having their first child.
Many well meaning, godly people have told Dave and I that we should also forgo the baby carriage for at least a year or two.
Ultimately though, each person and couple must make decisions that are in accordance with their beliefs about marriage, children, and birth control.
For me, waiting to have children simply because it is the “done thing” is not an option. I believe that the Bible is clear that fertility and children are a blessing, and that barrenness (which birth control deliberately creates) is a curse.
One way that God builds his kingdom is through his people bearing children and raising them to serve him. Right at the beginning of the first marriage, God told humankind to “be fruitful and multiply”.
Sex is not just about pleasure, although that is very important. It is equally about the privilege and responsibility of bringing children into the world.
When God created sex, he meant pleasure and procreation to go together. Human beings have compartmentalised this, enjoying one part of God’s good creation without feeling any obligation to accept the other.
Dave and I are both committed to these truths, and for us that means that we have chosen not to wait to have children.
This does not mean we are committed to never, ever using natural family planning (NFP) or barrier methods to space children or due to very serious circumstances. I have studied NFP and charted my fertility.
It just means that for us, welcoming children rather than preventing them is the default option. Very serious circumstances like severe illness, my chronic pain getting much worse, or extreme poverty (like, starvation level) could cause a re-think. We live in a fallen world, and the ideal is not always possible.
Unless a change of beliefs occurs though, wanting to have “time alone”, car size, not having bought a home yet, or the ordinary difficulties of pregnancy and child raising would not qualify as very serious circumstances.
So for us, the rhyme may just come true. We’ll have to just wait and see what God does. He may decide that we wait for a year or two, and we hope that we'll be at peace with that even though we're all excited up about the possibility of having a baby soon.
Children are gifts from God. We cannot presume to recieve them at our timing, and this is yet another reason why we've decided not to assume we can "wait" a year or four. If God does not bless us with children, we don't want the regret of knowing we once chose not to welcome them.
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage . . . ? We'll see.
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