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To Her, He Felt Like Home
Tehani Burgess’s father dropped her off to seminary early one morning. As she walked toward the chapel, he said, “I am proud of you”.
Tehani was 14 years old at the time and recalls an overwhelming feeling of happiness and gratitude in that moment. “I said to myself, ‘One day, I want my Heavenly Father to tell me the same thing.’”
It was around this time that she made a personal commitment: she would always live in a way that was pleasing to God, rather than to people. Tehani wanted to be in the world but not of it. “While I wasn’t perfect,” she says, “I was often asking myself, ‘What would Jesus do if he was in my situation?’, and ‘What would I do if Jesus was there watching me?’”
Tehani had learned about the importance of eternal families when she was baptised a few years earlier at the age of 10. Soon after, she was sealed in the temple to her parents and siblings, and she knew then that when the time came to start a family of her own, she could settle for nothing less than a temple wedding.
These decisions, made early in her life, influenced all her smaller, everyday choices. She wanted to make her Heavenly Father happy and to be worthy to enter the house of the Lord, so she stayed close to Him through prayer and scripture study. She regularly attended church meetings, stayed away from situations that could cause her to sin, and she was constantly seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Following your heart and the Spirit, however, can sometimes lead to unexpected behaviour. Tehani shocked her family and friends when she married Heiari’i Picard, a recently returned missionary, just over a month after they had met. This turn of events even surprised Tehani herself! But the feeling was undeniable.
Tehani and Heiari’i first met at an Especially for Youth counsellors’s meeting, when she was still in the Tahiti Faaa Stake. As they continued to talk, to get to know each other—and as they both prayed about their friendship—Tehani was eventually overcome by a sense of peace and security – a sense of ‘home’. This was the man who would take her to the temple, the one who would help her build the eternal family she had always wanted.
“We didn’t fall in love right away,” Tehani explains, “but day after day, we felt that together, we could get closer to God and build our family based on Christ.” It was clear that that Heavenly Father’s hand was in this union—so, with the added blessing and encouragement of Tehani's dad, the couple could think of no reason to prolong their engagement.
In early 2020, Tehani and Heiari’i celebrated their 10-year wedding anniversary. It hasn’t always been an easy journey—marriage is the ultimate learning experience—but after 10 years and four beautiful children, Tehani is more in love now with her husband and her life than she ever imagined she could be.
For young people faced with so many decisions these days, Tehani knows the world can be a scary place. “That’s why it’s so important to stay worthy to receive guidance from our Heavenly Father,” she says, “and to follow God’s will for us—even if it is not our will. He knows us better than we do, and He will always help us to make the best choices.”
It’s a principle she is teaching her children, a standard that Tehani is determined to follow for the rest of her life.