All of you more or less simply try to dig up and plant trees by yourself, but if you want to dig up and plant trees and make them live, the strength you need in order to do so is equivalent to putting your life on the line. You will need to utilize 100% of your strength.
Other tasks are like this as well.
Even though I’m simply telling you to take a single pine tree and transplant it in a different place and make it live, it is hard if you do it alone. That is why I am telling you to work together. If 10 people work together, then it only requires 1/10 of your strength. If 100 people do it, it only requires 1/100.
Once you try to do something, you will realize how hard it is to actually do it. Those who have dug up pine trees before know.
They tell me, “I didn’t know moving pine trees was this hard. It’s actually really difficult.”
Only those who have moved pine trees before know how precious those pine trees are. Others do not know.
With this place as well, people who did not participate in developing the landscape think that the pine trees on the rock landscape were there from the beginning. When they ask me, I just nod.
They say, “The pine trees here are preserved so naturally without them being moved,” and think that the trees were the easiest part of the landscaping.
However, we had to dig those trees up and transplant them here while biting our lips.
Digging in itself was difficult, but in order to plant the trees, we had to spade the boulders for four days and plant them between the rocks.
People do not know how much we endeavored to make this landscape. Nevertheless, the volunteers and I did it without letting a single tree die.
I managed the life of the trees while thinking, “Since we have dug and planted them like this, they should not die. I will do manage them earnestly.”
They would all be dead if I did it halfheartedly.
In this way, existing in itself is not an easy thing to do. Everything exists in the process of overcoming many difficulties. Nothing is the way it is for no reason.
Excerpt from the morning message of May 12, 1998; Pastor Jung Myung Seok