Hardest and easiest decision ever made

[txaggie07]

dated this calvinist girl for two years… we talked about marriage pretty seriously… for a while i was okay with contraception, but as we got closer to graduation time i was having second thoughts… aaaand one day she asked ‘what’s going on with us’ and i wasn’t the strongest on my decision, but i said i didn’t think i could use it. and that ended everything. i guess i’m just looking for prayers and reassurance God’s got someone else out there for me.

 

[SeekerJen]

I think God was watching out for you. If she was Calvinist, contraception would have been one of your lesser issues in marriage. I can almost guarantee that she would not have permitted your children to be raised in the Catholic church or even to receive the sacraments.

There is definitely someone out there for you. I’m guessing from your screenname that you’re either a student or just finished up. I didn’t meet my husband until after I finished undergrad. See if there’s a Catholic young adult group near you. Maybe you can meet someone there.

 

[Lil_M]

:hug1: That’s a hard decision to make. My FH was a Presbyterian, and the longer we dated, the more we struggled with “how are we going to do this if we marry?” Contraception was just one of MANY issues. Then after 4 years, he decided to go through RCIA and convert, and he had his First Communion and Confirmation last Easter Vigil.

But for a long time I debated whether or not to leave and find a Catholic. I agree with the PP, it hurts now but you likely saved yourself from future difficulties as a couple and with raising children. Kudos to you for realizing that now.

 

[ChristineML]

John Calvin (1509-1564), commentary on Genesis 38:8-10:

Besides, [Onan] not only defrauded his brother of the right due him, but also preferred his semen to putrify on the ground, rather than to beget a son in his brother’s name.

v. 10: The Jews quite immodestly gabble concerning this thing. It will suffice for me briefly to have touched upon this as much as modesty in speaking permits. The voluntary spilling of semen outside of intercourse between man and woman is a monstrous thing. Deliberately to withdraw from coitus in order that semen may fall on the ground is doubly monstrous. For this is to extinguish the hope of the race and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring. This impiety is especially condemned, now by the Spirit through Moses’ mouth, that Onan, as it were, by a violent abortion, no less cruelly than filthily cast upon the ground the offspring of his brother, torn from the maternal womb. Besides, in this way he tried, as far as he was able, to wipe out a part of the human race. If any woman ejects a foetus from her womb by drugs, it is reckoned a crime incapable of expiation and deservedly Onan incurred upon himself the same kind of punishment, infecting the earth by his semen, in order that Tamar might not conceive a future human being as an inhabitant of the earth.

Quoted in an appendix of Charles D. Provan’s The Bible and Birth Control

The Calvinists and many other Protestant groups have wandered far from their early reformer roots, and not just on the issue of contraception, either.