the wrap up: final God-centered and frugal wedding thoughts

at last we arrive at the end of the journey:  i am wrapping up my thoughts on wedding planning.  it has been fun to reminisce about our wedding, and it has redoubled my conviction to live, as john piper would put it, with a wartime lifestyle and mentality.

ultimately, i hope that reading my thoughts and ideas has changed your thinking about planning a wedding.  i hope that you are starting to recognize the lies that are proliferated in our society.  i hope that you truly have the desire that everything in your wedding would point to jesus christ.

and when it comes to the practical side of it all, i hope that your thinking has changed from "where do i find a good person to hire for _____?" to "who do i know that is good with _____?", from "where can i buy ___?" to "how can i make ____ and which of my friends can i invite to help me with it?"

to wrap up this series, i want to share some final thoughts and tips about the wedding planning process.  [and this gives me another excuse to share more pictures from our wedding... yay! :D ]

::accept ALL help::

i literally wrote down the name of every person who offered to help with our wedding.  and i took every single one of them up on the offer.  even if someone offers and you really don't think they will need your help, don't turn them down until you are positive there is nothing they can help with.

i already mentioned that my friends helped me make all the food, invitations and programs, chocolate fortune cookie favors , lent me a dress, gave us flowers and veggies from their garden and did my hair and make-up.  i also mentioned that family members blessed us by giving us the paper for our invites and programs, and by making our wedding cake.

furthermore, friends from our church helped to serve the drinks, my aunt did the alterations for the dress, my uncle put together a dvd slide show of pictures of us (with music!), my mom did the decorations, my cousin did all of the photography, my aunt (who works at avon) got us thank you gifts to give to people who helped out, etc etc etc.  i tried to count how many people helped with aspects of our wedding but i lost count at 30.

for the record, if i know you, i am willing to help with your wedding.  please ask if i don't offer first.

::ask for help::

some of the people who helped with parts of our wedding didn't necessarily offer their help, but were more than willing after i asked them.  one example is my uncle who works at a paper company.  i was slightly nervous to ask for his help, but i realized that if he knew how much of a blessing his help would be, he would have already offered.  sometimes we need to take the initiative to make people aware of our needs, because it gives them an opportunity to be a blessing. 

i think that in the body of christ, this type of serving should be the norm.  therefore, it should not even feel like a burden at all to ask another christian for help with something like this.


::pray for provision and wisdom::

we prayed a lot for our wedding.  we prayed for the spiritual side of our wedding, that God would be honored, and for the practical side, that God would provide.  and i can point to numerous ways that God specifically provided.

i also prayed a lot for wisdom.  when there were aspects of my wedding that i didn't know if we should include or not, i prayed about it (for example, the flowers. and i feel like he lead me to forego it for myself, but honor my bridesmaids by giving them bouquets to carry.)

it is easy to get caught up in the little details of a wedding.  but your heavenly Father knows what you need much more than you do.  so trust Him for it.

::be humble::

everything you will read on the internet, in magazines, in books and see on TLC will scream THIS DAY IS ABOUT YOU!!!! 

that is why you need to ask, no beg God for humility throughout the entire process and especially on your wedding day.

ask people who recently got married for their extras

i know people who have gotten all of their decorations from friends who had nothing else to do with their leftover decorations but give them away.  it is also common for people to have things like extra bottles of bubbles because not everyone took a bottle, and there is nothing else to do with 100 bottles of leftover bubbles (we were in this situation even though i did the same thing i did for the programs and bought way fewer than we had guests.  i asked everyone i knew who was getting married if they wanted our leftover bubbles and they all said no.  bummer.  i think i ended up giving them to goodwill before we moved to cali.  what a waste!)



did you miss a part of the series?  here are tips for:

::the foundation: having a right heart while planning your wedding

::the dress and the flowers

::the cake, hair and make-up

::the ring

::food and drinks

::invitations, programs and music

::favors