The Fruitful Callings of the Childless By Choice

Her.meneutics | Christianitytoday.com:

"Sometime in your late 20s, you start to notice a change with the invites sitting in your mailbox. The creamy white paper requesting your presence at a wedding transforms into a dainty baby-shower pink or blue. "

I am guessing this is a regional or perhaps religious thing.  I'm 36, and my friends have just started to have children   I also didn't really get wedding invitations until folks turned 30.  At 27, we were the first of our friends to marry, and our comparatively young age was understood as a consequence of dating for 10 years, not a statement about marriage-appropriate age.  

Regardless, yours truly is starting to enter the world of friends-with-kids.  I'm even staying at the home of friends with an infant next month (Well, OK, after 8 days spent partying with my No Kidding! Nashville friends).  So I'll finally get to blog about this quintessentially childfree experience as an insider, instead of as a New Yorker who lives in some strange, childfree paradise.

Of course, that's not really what the article is about.  It discusses childfreedom from the point of view of Christians:

"Being around friends with a houseful of kids doesn't cause us misery. It fills us with the same type of awe we get from watching ultra-marathon runners or astrophysicists. It's a glimpse into a foreign world we enjoy visiting.

Truthfully, the entire time we've been discussing this "radical" option, it never occurred to either of us that what we were talking about doing could be seen as sinful. It wasn't until I started researching the church's traditional stance on sexuality that I saw the huge weight placed on procreation.
. . .
Some people don't have kids because they never marry. Some have to face heartbreaking infertility and can't have children. And others might not have kids because God blessed them with passions and gifts that give them the same sense of fulfillment and joy that their friends get from their children."

As an aside, I first learned about hermeneutics (the study of texts, not the blog) when doing a research paper on the Bible in college.  Not coincidentally, that was also the last time I called myself a Christian.

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