Our world is full of irony and I learned about another one of those tidbits the other day. There are few who would deny that our culture worships sex and we have tried to separate the “fun” from the aspect that will get the girl pregnant. Every method of birth control that we have has a failure rate. To be honest, if we ignore rape, even abstinence has one documented failure. Alright, all joking aside, there are a surprising number of couples that have stopped using any form of birth control because they do not like the side effects. There are also a lot of people who continue to try different forms but never settle on one that they are happy with. You don’t have to look very far to learn what the failure rates are for each method and those who find themselves in that statistic can get pretty upset. Many argue that everyone else should switch away from the method that failed them. In fact, being stuck with children at all is now viewed as a horrible thing by some. There is a book that is making waves in France where the author says “I really regret it. I really regret having children.” Somehow our “education” makes us think that we ought to have perfect control over everything. This is not at all what the Bible says. Genesis 29:31:

And when the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb: but Rachel was barren.

I’ve heard people put down this belief as one that was antiquated. Such a view cannot be held without crossing out huge portions of the Bible. Consider what Paul wrote in Romans 4:19:

And being not weak in faith, he [Abraham] considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sara's womb:

If God opens and shuts the womb, how can we get angry? Is it because we think that we have figured out the secret formula that governs our own lives? We make our plans; God directs our steps (Proverbs 16:9). While I have not fully settled on how this knowledge is going to play out in my own life yet, I have tried to pay attention to what certain other people are doing. One of the methods that several of those couples are using (in conjunction with other methods) is the use of spermicides. The most common “active” ingredients in spermicides is a chemical called Nonoxynol-9 (N-9 for short). It seems that this chemical increases the woman’s susceptibility to yeast infection. So, even when we “can’t wait,” we increase the number of times we have to. Amusing, no?