I'm in the middle of organising my wedding for October 2007. What I have found really hard is to organise the reception. Living in Sydney provides a lot of different choices but the majority of these choices are really expensive. The price of the reception that my sister had only 3 years ago has more than tripled, from $30 pp to $95 pp.

So after looking around we found 2 places that were fairly reasonable in price and had a look at them on Saturday afternoon. Because it was the weekend we couldn't talk to the functions manager at the Bowling Club but there had been confusion as to whether it would be a $3 pp surcharge for having our reception on the Monday public holiday or if it was 30% surcharge over everything (room hire, meals and drinks etc).

Place number 2 (Seafood Restaurant) was really nice. But nowhere near as much room. They cost a little bit more per person for the meals but they aren't charging room hire and they aren't charging a surcharge for the public holiday. Whilst I really liked the Bowling Club premises, I knew that the Seafood Restaurant would be a wiser financial decision.

So I gave the matter over to God. I prayed that He would help provide guidance for me in choosing which reception place and that if when we called for confirmation on Monday morning about the surcharges, that if it was a 30% surcharge I would take it to use the Seafood Restaurant as our wedding reception venue.

So it turned out that the Bowling Club had the 30% surcharge over everything which made it very expensive indeed. So I had just finished talking to my fiance and parents about using the Seafood Restaurant as our reception and the functions manager from the Seafood restaurant called. We told her that we would use the Seafood Restaurant as our wedding reception. After discussing a few details she said that she knew we were on a budget and would drop the per person price down by $4 (this makes a big difference once you calculate the number of people coming). This is a real blessing. Because we had already agreed to use the restaurant before she gave us that discount. And I had been slightly worried about the price being a little high per person.

This is definitely a blessing from God. I had left the reception place in His hands and He has blessed us more than I thought was possible. This is a good lesson from me because I have a really bad habit of taking things into my own hands and doing things myself. I am learning to hand things over to God, even when I think I can handle them on my own. God is only waiting to bless us, we just need to let Him into our lives to do so. :)