We often observe or celebrate designated weeks, months or even years that bear a specific title.

Sometimes it might be a time of thanksgiving such as National Nurses Week or Catholic Schools Week.

But sometimes weeks are designated to remind us about challenges that need to be met to accomplish what is good. Consider for example National Diabetes Awareness Month or Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Both serve to encourage society not to forget but rather to confront and overcome challenges that are damaging to it and to individuals.

This coming week, July 20-26, is one of those weeks that remind us and challenge us to live our faith fully and to be a light for the world where it is greatly needed. This week is Natural Family Planning Awareness Week.

Of course in many circles, the mention of Natural Family Planning (NFP) is met with embarrassed silence. Since the onset of the sexual revolution in the ’60s and ’70s, the solid human and religious goods achieved for individuals (especially women) and for marriages by NFP have been disparaged or simply ignored.

But rather than an obsession with disjointed moral teachings, NFP represents the beauty of the Church’s understanding about the dignity of the human person and its relation to a central element of life, that is sexuality.

Briefly put, we recognize the great dignity of every person because more than anything else in the created world we are in the image and likeness of God.

Because we bear His image, God takes great joy in the existence of every person, and each of us is given the chance for eternal life with Him.

But God goes even further. He allows us to cooperate with Him in the transmission of new life. Man and woman, male and female He has made for each other.

It is the joining of man and woman into one flesh that is the means for the creation of more of us made in God’s image. In this context we can see immediately the sacredness of the intimacy between man and woman.

Human experience as well as our Catholic faith sees that intimacy as having two essential goals: the fostering of greater unity between the couple and an openness to God’s gift of human life.

That greater unity can only occur when there is a total giving of the man and woman to each other.

That is why sexual expression must be within the context of marriage.

Only a couple that has formally committed themselves each to the other before God and the community have established an exclusive union that is total self-giving. That unreserved giving of self is also the logic for marriage as a lifetime commitment.

That same total self-giving makes sexual expression in marriage have its real meaning. Sexuality that withholds anything is less than self-giving. The use of artificial contraception then, whether so intended or not, is actually a withholding from our intimacy of a great gift that God has bestowed upon us, openness to new life. And often, whether by drugs or other means, that burden is placed upon the woman.

NFP is the means by which a couple avails themselves of the scientific knowledge and our own human nature to work with God as He has made us in fostering the goals of unity and openness. By using NFP couples can pray and discern and work to conceive or space children in a moral manner.

Critics say that NFP doesn’t work. But the statistics say otherwise.

Critics say that NFP takes discipline. Sure, but don’t most good things?

And the result, if you talk to couples who use NFP, is a high level of satisfaction, a high level of marriage duration, greater communication between the husband and wife, a deeper prayer life and all of these advantages are drug free.

Our society is plagued by its sexual excesses. The result is family break ups, children raised without a father or a mother, our young people going off to college and being pressured to enter into the lifestyle of an immoral free-for-all, all of these things come together with the resulting diminishing number of marriages and children in society.

NFP and especially the values and the outlook that it represents are a joyful reminder to us of the great good that God has called us to.

Call your parish or the Life and Family Evangelization Office of the Diocese of Rockford to get the details, especially if you are planning to be married in the near future. And if you are already married, and not currently using NFP, call to learn more about this great gift.

Happy Natural Family Planning Aware-ness Week.