Natural Family Planning International

Dear Friends of Life and Honest Love,

First of all, please pray for Sheila and me.  We are the “staff” at NFP International.  We are pleased to work as 100% volunteers.  We each put in close to 30 hours a week, and we thank God almost daily for the gift of work, especially work that can be helpful to others in an important area of their lives.  On the other hand, sometimes our patience is challenged to the max.  For example, in the revision of the online manual, we put in a number of charting examples.  We don’t know how to do this with a graphics program, so Sheila makes a handwritten graphic and then scans it into the Word document.  Or tried and tried to scan it.  That led to a two-hour phone conversation with someone in south India who said he would study the problem and call us back, and he did about 24 hours later.  In the meantime we uninstalled and reinstalled the program, and somehow it worked.  Then another program wouldn’t work, and that took another extended phone session with a different company, but now it works.  I have enrolled in an on-line graphics course so we can do the graphics better for the book we hope to publish.  Can an old dog learn new tricks?  I shall try, but I had a hard time understanding the computerese of the instructor before the course even started.  Please pray for us that we get the technical support we need. 

Please pray also that if the Lord wants this effort to grow and keep going He will send us some energetic, faith-filled, knowledgeable young people eager to do this work which includes raising the funds for a small full-time staff and office space. 

Please pray regularly for a rebirth of chastity, for a stop to contraception and abortion, and for a culture of life.  Please pray that the NFP movement will become a tremendous agent of evangelization within the Church and within Western culture. 

Please take a look at Chapter 1 of our newly revised online manual.  If you think it offers a persuasive case for generosity in the service of life, for using only the natural methods when you have sufficiently serious reasons, and for listening to the Church, please tell others.  Look at the whole four-chapter text of just under 100 pages.  If you would like to use it for teaching, let us know. 

We would like to increase our membership.  If you contribute, you are a member! 

Please be generous with your financial support as well as your prayers.  You have heard more than once in the last few weeks that Lent is a time of prayer, penance, and almsgiving.  If you share our belief that teaching marital chastity is a work of the Lord, then please make NFP International the beneficiary of your almsgiving—as much as you can.  We send only three appeals per calendar year.  This is our first appeal in 2008; the next will come in early fall.  So we need sufficient funds to last us for the next six months.  Please help. 

Granted, the work of trying to facilitate a rebirth of chastity is simply overwhelming.  Please don’t be so discouraged that you think it’s a hopeless cause and therefore not worth supporting.  There are signs and rumors that more and more bishops and priests are already doing something practical or are getting ready to do so.  We have the privilege of helping couples via the internet, email and phone.  We even receive an occasional question from someone taking another organization’s course, and we are pleased to help.  We believe that NFP International is an important and worthwhile apostolate.  Please support it. 

If you are hard pressed but can still afford five or ten dollars, please send it along with your prayers.  If you can afford those bread and butter gifts of $25 to $100, please do what you can.  If you can help us with larger gifts of $250, $500, $1,000 or $2,500, may God give you the satisfaction of knowing that you are making a significant contribution toward the support of our efforts both here in the States as well as in Eastern Europe. 

May you have a spiritually enriching last two weeks of Lent, and may God grant the true joy of Easter to you and each member of your family.

Sincerely in the Lord,

John F. Kippley

NFP International is a 501-C-3 not for profit organization.  Gifts are tax deductible.
Please make checks payable to NFP International and send to: NFPI, P.O.Box 11216, Cincinnati, OH 45211.

Next Week:  Why NFP is important?

After a few years of not teaching NFP classes, Sheila and I taught our first class of a revised NFP course for our new organization, NFP International.  It was fun.
     The preparation for teaching was something less than fun.  A teaching couple had sent us a PowerPoint presentation, but we didn’t have a projector.  We ordered one, but its shipment was delayed, so it was scheduled to arrive late in the afternoon the day before the class.  I can’t live with that sort of “iffy,” so we prepared to teach directly from a printout of our online manual, “Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book.”  We were teaching at the request of our pastor who had one couple under instruction for a summer wedding.  We did no other publicity aside from that parish’s Sunday bulletin, so we knew we would have only one to three couples in attendance.  We printed out a manual for them as well. 
     As it turned out, we taught only the one couple, and teaching from the manual was easy.  We sat at a table facing the couple at their table.  Sheila and I each had a manual, and the couple shared theirs.  As usual, we split up the teaching every few minutes.  It was simple: ask a question directly from the manual and answer it in our own words or sometimes directly from the text.  We added a few practice charts, and before the break the couple had evaluated the temperature pattern on two different charts.  We came back to these same charts for the evaluation of the mucus and cervix signs.  For us it was an enjoyable experience. 
     We are currently making a few changes in the manual to make it even better for such purposes, and we may decide to keep teaching right from that manual when we have only one to three couples to instruct.  The PowerPoint presentation will be better suited for larger groups.  We will continue to teach from the manual for the second and third meetings of this course.
     In retrospect, the late arrival of the projector was a blessing in disguise.  If it had arrived earlier, we would have used the PowerPoint presentation and would not have had this no-tech experience.  One advantage of this approach is that we were able to maintain face-to-face contact with the couple in a fully lit room.  Another advantage of using just the manual without a projector is that this approach is well suited for poor areas of the world where electricity is either non-existent or irregular.
     What makes teaching the NFPI program rewarding is that its teachers know that it is essentially the same program that they taught successfully over the years but with a revised approach.     

NEXT WEEK:  CCL now says the old was good.

John F. Kippley
Sex and the Marriage Covenant: A Basis for Morality (Ignatius)
Natural Family Planning: The Question-Answer Book
www.NFPandmore.org