ZEBULON, NC (Catholic Online) - Childhood sweethearts, my husband and I married for the first time at Sts. Peter and Paul Russian Orthodox Church.  After the beautiful, two hour long Liturgy complete with crowns and chanting, my mother remarked there was no doubt we had indeed been united by this sacrament.

Unlike some modern weddings which focus on flowery arrangements, self-appointed roles and individually crafted vows, ours followed tradition with its focus on the sacramental and not so much the selves.  Of course, at 21 and 23 we'd have a lot to learn about life and marriage in the years to come.

Having married outside of the Catholic Church, our pre-cana consisted only of a few short meetings with the priest, who was to marry us.  I remember only his encouraging me to convert and little else.  We missed the boat, so to speak, on so many crucial lessons, but thankfully God always has a back-up plan.

Totally unaware of the Churches' teachings, we contracepted early on until the time when we deemed ourselves ready to welcome another family member.  What joy it seemed then to ask God to create a new life on our terms, in our time. 

However, after the death of our firstborn we began to realize that life was far more fragile than we'd considered and our well-crafted life plans disappeared with his heartbeat.  We desperately wanted more children and so I suppose our hearts were ready soil for God to plant a different kind of seed.

Browsing through a bookstore's discount bin at the mall, I happened upon a thick book that grabbed my attention.  Fertility awareness was the topic, and seeing as our attempts to conceive had taken much time and effort the first time around, it seemed the perfect read.  I gobbled up that book and eagerly applied the newly found knowledge about my basal body temperature, mucus and cervical changes.

Fast forward six years and many changes later, my husband converted to the Catholic faith and we married "for the second time" in a little chapel at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church.  In truth, standing there surrounded by a few friends and flanked by a toddler and a baby, we had our marriage, which was already considered valid by the Catholic Church, blessed.  

While our "first" marriage had united us together in that permanent bond of marriage, endowing us with the gifts to live out that vocation, I believe that "second" marriage made us evermore conscious of our need to rely on Divine Providence and our responsibility to actively grow together in our faith. 

Like too many other young people, after our wedding ceremony we had created all too many excuses for sleeping in on Sundays and relegated Christ to Easter and Christmas those first few years.  Thankfully, once our family size increased, so too did our knowledge of the necessity for faith, but still missing were those hard truths.  

Though my eyes had been opened to the beauty of my fertility, unfortunately that initial method of fertility awareness was void of theological truth and thus allowed for contraceptive behaviors and devices during the fertile phase of the cycle.  It also didn't challenge us to include God in our family planning, though at the time we felt an internal stirring to openness. Thankfully, our Lord is patient and so He nurtured that sapling and in time He would redirect its growth.

By the time we were celebrating our tenth anniversary, we'd been blessed with one son through adoption, two more birth sons, and our first daughter had entered the world.  By all accounts our cup was overflowing, but in reality we were standing on the precipice of divorce, contemplating the looming pit of broken vows and broken dreams.

Well-meaning friends and family worried about our children and about divorced parents trying to raise them apart, so they encouraged us to protect ourselves.  Protect ourselves, especially, against the possibility of anymore conceptions.  Really, with four children already, many people couldn't understand why we'd ever want more.  Their advice seemed reasonable, so we took it and reverted back to contracepting during the fertile time.

We chose to work through our trial with a Christian therapist, who instructed us in reading the Bible.  Little did this faithful, Protestant therapist know, not only was he helping to heal our broken hearts, but he was leading us deeper into our Catholic faith.  For the first time, we began reading God's Word separately and together.  A deeper and more intimate relationship developed between the three of us (Christ, my husband and me) and we developed a thirst for more. 

Truthfully, I knew something wasn't right in our contracepting, but I couldn't quite figure out what that "something" was.  When I'd contracepted in our early years, I ...