It is genuinely difficult to put into words what Sharlene brought to our wedding journey.

From our very first conversations, there was a warmth and calm about her that made us feel completely held. Wedding planning is an enormous blessing, but between work, family expectations, finances, suppliers and endless decisions, it can also become a very concentrated season of constantly doing and responding. Our conversations with Sharlene gave us permission to pause.

So much of wedding planning is necessarily transactional. Sharlene continually brought us back to the reason underneath all of it: we weren’t simply planning a wedding, we were preparing for marriage.

Our faith was incredibly important to us and we wanted God at the centre of our ceremony. We expected Sharlene to help create that environment on the day, but we hadn’t anticipated how beautifully she would do that throughout the journey too. She prayed over us during our conversations and continually brought us back to the covenant we were preparing to make. Those moments felt like an enormous exhale.

And then there was our love story, without question one of the most special parts of our ceremony.

Ahead of the wedding, Sharlene asked us separately to share our memories and perspectives on our relationship: how we met, our journey and the moments and people that had shaped us. Neither of us knew what the other had written and, by the wedding, we could barely remember our own answers.

She somehow took those two separate accounts and wove them into one story that was funny, moving, deeply personal and completely us. We knew she would share our story during the ceremony, but had no idea what she had created. So, in this strange and beautiful way, we experienced our own love story almost for the first time, alongside our family and friends.

We spend so much of our lives hearing other people’s stories and having enough distance to recognise the beauty in them. Rarely do we get to stand outside our own lives and see our own journey with that same perspective. Sharlene gave us that gift.

It felt like having a mirror held up to us. These were our memories, but through the way she had woven them together, we could suddenly see the story they had formed. We could appreciate how far we had come, how much life we had already lived together and, most importantly for us, how far God had brought us.

That level of care ran through everything she did. Sharlene wanted to understand not just what had happened, but who we were. She took care over every detail, even making sure she had the correct pronunciation of every name. She also found such a beautiful and sensitive way to honour loved ones who were no longer physically with us, and you could feel how deeply that connected people across the room.

Anyone can stand at the front of a room and read a script. What Sharlene created was something entirely different. There was so much thought, listening and intentionality behind every word. Nothing felt generic or performative. She truly understood us and somehow reflected us back to ourselves.

On the day, she was exceptional: warm, commanding, funny and completely at ease with the room. We have genuinely lost count of how many guests have told us how brilliant she was.

But what we will remember most is how she made us feel: seen, understood, calm and incredibly held.

Sharlene didn’t simply officiate our wedding. She honoured our story and helped us stop long enough to recognise the beauty of it ourselves.

We could not recommend her more highly.