Simcha Fisher > Quotes

“Sometimes difficulty clarifies things. And sometimes realizing that the road you’ve chosen is a demanding one gives you the courage to stay on that road. It reveals the nature of our relationship with God. It sounds cute and comforting to say “God is in control,” and people who say that may imagine sitting on their daddy’s lap behind the wheel of the family car, going “Vroom vroomy vroom!” while Daddy does the steering. In reality, when God is in control, it feels more like one of those movies where some amateur has to step up and land the airplane or steer the ship to safety through a crashing storm, with an expert giving them instructions remotely through a headset. In theory, following the expert’s instructions will help us get in safely; but our fear, panic, self-doubt, and lack of skill are not exactly comforting. Yes, God is in control, but we’re the ones who are in for a rough ride.”
― Simcha Fisher, The Sinner's Guide to Natural Family Planning

“If you’re struggling with NFP, it’s not because you’re a crappy person, or because the Church doesn’t understand what sex is like in real life. It’s because, for some people, NFP is a genuine and significant cross.”
― Simcha Fisher, The Sinner's Guide to Natural Family Planning

“But I grow more and more skeptical of the charge that, among the tiny fraction of Catholics who use NFP, most use it with a “contraceptive mentality.”
― Simcha Fisher, The Sinner's Guide to Natural Family Planning

“But when two notes played together sound “off,” we don’t fix it by trying to make them both play the same note. Instead, we adjust the tension until they are different, but complementary again. This is what we should be striving for in our sexual lives: not equality or fairness, but a rediscovery of complementarity.”
― Simcha Fisher, The Sinner's Guide to Natural Family Planning

“Maybe that’s why God designed women to be fertile each month, rather than, say, quarterly: so we’d have to keep thinking and thinking about it, revisiting, revising, comparing our desires and needs against our current capabilities. Our challenge is to think about eternity, but to act in the now.”
― Simcha Fisher, The Sinner's Guide to Natural Family Planning