Is it wrong for Christians to limit how many kids they have to stay comfortable?

The holy fathers tell us one of the paramount ways we are martyred is in and through our children, having a family and raising them. Yet in the West people say, I only want a couple of kids, or even Christians say, I don't want any kids. What do they not want? It's not that they don't want children. They don't want the martyrdom that goes along with it. And there is only one way to become like Christ, which is to emulate him.

Christ did not live in ease and comfort. He traveled great distances, had one seamless garment sewn by the Mother of God, lived off the generosity of strangers, had basically no possessions, and then underwent brutal torture and crucifixion. We want to be like him without the crucifixion, without the suffering. But our life as Christians is to emulate Christ.

We may not be facing martyrdom in the West yet, but if our life doesn't look like the carrying of the cross, maybe our life isn't a real Christian life. If we run from anything that makes us uncomfortable, we need an internal evaluation, because the only life in Christ is one of crucifixion. This idea that you become a Christian to be comfortable, with two kids, a paid-off mortgage, and a 401k, is a complete denial of the incarnation.

The incarnation was the path to show us that crucifixion is not our enemy, humility is not our enemy, suffering is not our enemy. They are the means by which we become more like our Lord Jesus Christ. It is a hard life to be a Christian, and if our life isn't hard, we need to reevaluate whether what we're claiming matches what we're living.