Parents work for the sake of their children. There are no parents who work only to feed themselves. When poor parents with many children work hard in the fields or on worksites, carrying heavy loads with an A-frame on their back or weeding a field with a hoe, it is for their children's happiness to last indefinitely.
The sweat of toil dripping from their foreheads is not for their own sake. When the fruit of this sweat mingles with their loving heart for their children, a new history of creation will unfold there. Although they may weed a field or carry a back frame on a worksite, each tread of their footsteps is carving out a new history.
Among the forty million citizens of our country, many parents do not love their children. From their midst, if there were parents whose loving heart for their children could last for more than ten or twenty years, children of filial piety could not but appear in their family.
Children will realize their parents' hard work for them just by looking at their faces and hands. When they come to feel their parents' love emanating from their innermost core, the profound circumstances of times long past will flow out there.
Through that, parents help their children to contribute to the nation, thereby becoming national or global parents.
Furthermore, when you study with ardent hearts to fulfill your parents' wishes, you will become the new pillars of the nation. Those among you lacking such an emotion or feeling are not studying properly.
If parents educate their children with patriotic hearts by saying, “We love you, strive hard for you, work hard, and sweat for you because we want you to think of this country more than yourselves,” then those children who have been educated in love by such parents will strive to become the patriots desired by them.
Whenever they recall their parents' love, they will think of their forty million compatriots. Furthermore, they will study hard with a heart of wanting to serve their people, and if those people were to become miserable, they would feel more miserable than their parents about it.
Yet, they do not become patriots just by having such a heart. They must also have a substantial foundation they have established while having that heart. Only then will it be something that the people of the nation can admire forever. Otherwise, it will all pass away. It is serious when we think of all these matters.
If there were teachers at your school who strive to transmit correct ideas to their students while worrying about the destiny of the Republic of Korea, they would hold their students' hands in tears and admonish them thus: “Do not follow us but rather follow the nation.
We want you to do good things for the nation rather than for us.” Students taught this way will fulfill the purpose that their teachers could not fulfill.
This way, if teachers devote themselves and dedicate their whole lives to their students, and if parents devote themselves to their children, cherishing the value of the nation and the world higher than their own, the students of those teachers and the children of those parents will become the pillars of the world.
END OF SERMON