Katherine & Lorenzo Resendez Testimony
“We are happily married, young parents, method-hopping newbies when it comes to NFP. But, we have experienced great graces in our marriage from embracing the Church’s teaching on love, marriage, and family life. Lorenzo and I both experienced the spark of faith kindled into a fire in our hearts during high school as part of a retreat team at our home parish (where we met, got to know each other and started dating!). We are far from perfect, but it was a pretty great start to hang out at church and spend weekends together putting on retreats.
We dated my senior year of high school, long-distance through college, and got engaged after graduation. We spent another year apart when I was a missionary in Kansas City and Lorenzo started his dream job with Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Arlington. After falling in love with Jesus in high school, we knew that we would not use birth control in our marriage and that we wanted to practice NFP. I love moral theology and this kind of stuff, so we signed up for an online (yay for being long-distance still) Sympto-Thermal Method (STM) NFP class shortly after we got engaged. I started taking my temperature and charting on an app that Lorenzo could also see from 2000 miles away. We had many theoretical discussions during our engagement, but it is a different experience when the rubber meets the road in marriage!
We were married on July 13, 2018 at our home parish in New Mexico. By this time, I had been charting for almost a year and was amazed by how God created my body. I could predict what was going to happen the next day before it happened. The ebb and flow of my cycle and our fertility, and the communication that NFP naturally lends itself to, was such a blessing in the first months of our marriage and continues to be in our family today.
We decided that in March we would start having the conversation about maybe, possibly being open to a baby. Well, a little bit of baby fever and a few discussions about being “prudently and generously open to life”*, and we had a positive pregnancy test in January! [*Lorenzo and I both have undergrad degrees in Theology and had the opportunity (err… assignment) to read many Church documents including Humanae Vitae. This prophetic document written by Pope Paul VI includes the call for parents to be “prudently and generously open to life”. It is a beautiful document worth diving into!]
Fast-forward to 9/19/19 and we welcomed Lilyanna Rose into the world. After that, we became method hoppers after having a really hard time with STM during the postpartum time. We made the switch to the Marquette Method (MM) which has been good for this season of our marriage.
Being open to life in God’s perfect timing, we welcomed Karoleigh Marie on March 14, 2021, to make us a family of 4! We are now back navigating the postpartum time, but I feel much more confident in being able to recognize what is happening with my fertility. Now, instead of using the Clearblue fertility monitor (MM) blindly hanging on for the ride of low, high, and peak days, I am able to use the monitor reading to confirm what I am already attuned to in my body. This is one of the big gifts of using NFP, knowing and appreciating the way God made my body to work!
Whatever method of NFP you use, whatever your “prudently and generously open to life” looks like, whatever challenges and graces arise in your marriage, the fruits of NFP are for you. Like any NFP blog will tell you, there are certainly challenges. But, rather than bringing frustration and division, the challenges of NFP bring unity, the opportunity for communication, and a deeper appreciation for the masculinity or femininity of your spouse.”