In this episode, we answer questions for our community about having children, birth control, how many kids to have and more.

Please also take a moment and download our free 52 Date Night Ideas eBook.

http://datenightideas.com

PRAYER

Dear Lord,

Thank you for the gift and blessing of children. Thank you for creating and designing us with the ability to recreate, what an incredible miracle life truly is. We thank you for the opportunity to build our family and have children. We pray for others who either have not had children yet or in awaiting their first in anticipation. May you lead them in the way you desire them to walk and to grow together. We praise you for all those who have children and we also pray for those who can’t have children for whatever the reason may be. You are sovereign and we trust you. We continue to surrender our hearts to you as you lead us in parenting and raising our children to know you. Please help us with our fears and insecurities. Please remind us every day of the purpose we have with our family. May your name be glorified.

In Jesus’ name, amen!

READ FULL TRANSCRIPT

- [Aaron] Hey, we're Aaron and Jennifer Smith with Marriage After God.

- [Jennifer] Helping you cultivate an extraordinary marriage.

- [Aaron] And today we're gonna answer some of your questions about having children.

- [Aaron] Welcome to the Marriage After God podcast where we believe that marriage was meant for more than just happily ever after.

- [Jennifer] I'm Jennifer, also known as Unveiled Wife.

- [Aaron] And I'm Aaron, also known as Husband Revolution.

- [Jennifer] We have been married for over a decade.

- [Aaron] And so far, we have four young children.

- [Jennifer] We have been doing marriage ministry onlinae for over seven years through blogging and social media.

- [Aaron] With the desire to inspire couples to keep God at the center of their marriage, encouraging them to walk in faith every day.

- [Jennifer] We believe the Christian marriage should be an extraordinary one, full of life.

- [Aaron] Love.

- [Jennifer] And Power.

- [Aaron] That can only be found by chasing after God.

- [Jennifer] Together.

- [Aaron] Thank you for joining us on this journey as we chased boldly after God's will for our life together.

- [Jennifer] This is Marriage After God. Hey, everyone welcome back to another episode of Marriage After God. We're happy to be with you and we're really excited about this episode, and just being able to answer your questions. So doing Q&As is gonna be just an awesome new feature of the podcast where every couple of weeks, we're gonna poll our trusty community on Instagram and ask you guys what questions you have, and hopefully get some answers, well I should say opinions.

- [Aaron] Yeah 'cause we have all the answers.

- [Jennifer] No.

- [Aaron] On everything.

- [Jennifer] We don't but you know what, we're happy to explore these questions with you. And so thank you to everyone who shared these questions with us, and specifically about about having kids which we have a little bit of experience with. And so we'll dive into that in just a bit. All right, so one thing that we really are excited to share with you guys is that we have a new freebie for all of you.

- [Aaron] So everyone has already did the free prayer challenge.

- [Jennifer] Right.

- [Aaron] They already got the date night conversations.

- [Jennifer] You better, we've been sharing about those two for a while. So I begged Aaron, and I was like, "Let's do something new. "We've gotta do something new."

- [Aaron] So this one is date night ideas. It's a free download. It's a list of 52 date night ideas which you could do one a week for the whole year.

- [Jennifer] So is this something we're committing to? We're gonna go through all of these and do them?

- [Aaron] Sure.

- [Jennifer] Let's do it.

- [Aaron] Let's see how it goes.

- [Jennifer] I think that would be so fun.

- [Aaron] So if you wanna get this freebie, this download, you just go to datenightideas.com and you can download our free ebook with 52 date night ideas.

- [Jennifer] And the goal is one a week but if you can't do one week, do three a week. It's fine--

- [Aaron] If you have to do one a day, you know what, you can get done faster--

- [Jennifer] Have fun with it.

- [Aaron] And just do it all over again.

- [Jennifer] Have fun with it. No, but you can use these whenever you want and you can even sift through them and pull from it.

- [Aaron] You know what would be fun is if they downloaded this and then found another couple to do a challenge with. How many they can get done in a year?

- [Jennifer] Interesting, the other thing you could do is print them out and cut them out and stick them in a jar and pull them out randomly.

- [Aaron] Yeah.

- [Jennifer] That would be fun.

- [Aaron] That's a great idea. Datenightideas.com, one word and it's free. Go get it, so the topic we're talking about, these Q&As, they're all on a similar topic. We polled our followers on Instagram and many of the questions were around children. Having children, children after marriage.

- [Jennifer] So we're like let's stick them all in one episode so we can hit them all at once.

- [Aaron] And so we're just gonna, some of these we're gonna wing answering. If we don't have good answers, we might say we don't know. We're not afraid to say we don't know.

- [Jennifer] And just keep in mind that these are just our positions on these questions. How we would answer them based off of our experience and knowledge and--

- [Aaron] And things that we know of the Bible.

- [Jennifer] Things that we know of the Bible and what we believe in so--

- [Aaron] Take it for what it is.

- [Jennifer] Yeah and thank you guys again for asking these questions and sharing them with us and we really appreciate that. If you wanna jump on board for the next Q&A, just follow along on Instagram @marriageaftergod.

- [Aaron] And you can always send us your questions in a message and we may not answer it in the message but we'll take down the question and potentially answer it in a future Q&A episode. We'd love to get those from you. So why don't we just jump right in to the first question and this is a doozy I feel like 'cause it's controversial, it could be.

- [Jennifer] It could be yeah.

- [Aaron] And they ask us their question and they said, our view on birth control.

- [Jennifer] So what's your view on birth control?

- [Aaron] That's a good question.

- [Jennifer] It's a big question.

- [Aaron] Okay, next question is, no I'm just kidding. Our view on birth control.

- [Jennifer] Let me share my point of view first.

- [Aaron] Okay, go ahead.

- [Jennifer] I'll just be honest. I went on birth control 'cause that's what I heard you do when you get married. And so I went on the month before I got married and I chose to go off of it a month after we were married. So I was on it for a total of two months and I got married at 21, you were 22. And we were so excited married and so excited to--

- [Aaron] Be with each other physically.

- [Jennifer] Yeah, experience what sex was like and it was awful. I'm just gonna be honest. It was very painful for me and so I scrambled, you guys. I tried to figure out why is my body responding this way because it was my body that was keeping us from experiencing--

- [Aaron] Physical intimacy.

- [Jennifer] Healthy, physical intimacy. And so one of the things that came to my mind was something that was super obvious because over the course of that month of being married, not only were we having these issues but I gained a lot of weight. I got acne.

- [Aaron] There was a lot of things going on. There was emotional stuff.

- [Jennifer] Emotional ups and downs and mood swings and it was awful and I didn't feel myself. And so the obvious question then is what happened in the last few weeks that has changed me?

- [Aaron] Other than getting married.

- [Jennifer] I know it's a big transition.

- [Aaron] I that that guy you married can make you feel crazy, I get it.

- [Jennifer] But we narrowed it down to birth control and so I chose to go off of it and I haven't regretted it.

- [Aaron] And it didn't fix everything but it did actually drastically change your mood.

- [Jennifer] And some of the physical things that I was--

- [Aaron] Some of the physical things you were experiencing.

- [Jennifer] Yeah.

- [Aaron] So that's an experience you had with birth control. We know tons of people use birth control. I also know that there is certain people that say birth control is a sin. I'm not gonna go that far. I'm not gonna make statements like that. What I will say is I'm not an advocate for opting to put a chemical in your body to adjust and manipulate how your body is naturally meant to work. So that's my, you're meant to do a certain thing. Your body has been created to do a certain thing and birth control is meant to stop that thing from h