cc: file, Andrea, Tony Hafen, Sara and Des Penny, Pauline Nelson via mail, & Maxine Shirts
"Ben, Brian, and I are back from China. What a trip. Ben and Brian have promised to send me an e-mail report of their trip, which I plan to make the basis of Thoughtlet 0306.html. One logistic issue that became fairly obvious to me in regards to the list (http://www.walden3d.com/thoughtlets/china.txt), it is not going to work to have children under the age of 12 on this list. Brian and Ben did fine with time changes and food and hotels and walking miles and miles. However, watching babies throw up in airports, listening to young children cry on airplanes, and thinking about my objectives in inviting those I love to visit China with me, I have concluded it does not make any sense to take babies and young children to China. Perfection does not come all at once. It comes step by step, line upon line, precept upon precept, and like we don't give a baby meat to eat until their bodies are ready to digest it, my conclusion is we don't want to subject them to the rigors of international travel until they are old enough to understand what is happening. Kate and Paul, Melanie and Jared, and Sarah I hope you understand this has nothing to do with my love of Grant, Colby, and Ethan. And yet maybe it has everything to do with my love for them. Of course, my comments about not taking kids on international trips has nothing to do with overseas employment. If a job is taken overseas, the family will do best to stay together.
My topic this week might seem weird to some. Yet becoming perfect seemed to be a theme of our week in China, at least for me. I'm sure you are all acquainted with the scripture at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, where our Savior says:
Like most of my Thoughtlet themes, I never know where they
are going to come from, nor how they will come up. This
time it was the combination of a something said or seen on
the plane trip over, which had my mind thinking about the
concept of perfection, a sacrament meeting talk at the
Beijing Branch on prayer, and then watching a television
show of Chinese ribbon dancers with Brian while Ben was in
the shower. Weird how the mind works, isn't it? Or maybe
it is just weird how my mind works.
I don't remember what was said or seen regarding the process of achieving perfection on the ride from Houston (left the house at 5:30AM Friday) to L.A., from L.A. (met Ben and Brian at the Northwest ticket counter in L.A.) to Narita, Japan, or from Narita (got really confused about time differences, and for a few minutes I thought we had six hours to wait instead of the actual two hours for our flight out, and so I was figuring out how to take the kids to see the Narita Buddhist temple) to Beijing (we arrived at about 9:30 PM Saturday evening). After we checked into the hotel I took the boys for a walk to see this part of Beijing. It was cold, and the walk helped settle us into the time change. The walk gave me time to clean out my mind and get ready for the week. I do know that my mind had been prepared about being perfect, that an old, and yet a new, idea was planted in my mind, and that I had recognized this new insight prior to going to church first thing Sunday morning. The old, and yet new, idea was regarding the process of achieving perfection. The idea is simply summarized in the children's story `My Turn On Earth,' page 24, where it says:
I had forgot to write down the address of the church, and so
my last call home was to have Andrea look up the address on
an old e-mail, which she did. I took the map the hotel gave
us downstairs, after a great breakfast, and got the concierge
to show me where the church was at. It was within a couple
of blocks of the Landmark Tower, where I was suppose to meet
Bill Jentch at 1:15 PM. Church was from 9:30-12:30, so it
worked out just perfect. In talking to the concierge, I
learned that a cab ride to the airport should cost 80 yuan,
and we paid 300 yuan because I let a guy talk us into going
with him. It was a good lesson for Ben and Brian, and they
did not make a mistake like that again on the trip. I forgot
to pack any neckties, and so my assignment for Ben and Brian
was to find me a couple of neckties. However, I went to
church without a tie, and although nothing was said, a member
of the Branch Presidency, who happens to be a lawyer, seemed
pretty put off in his interaction with me after the meeting.
I asked what I can and can not say to Mr. Yan about the
church. His response was that we are to say nothing about
the church, and we can not invite Chinese citizens to attend
church with us. So I was careful to follow this advice
through out the week. It is obvious there must be order in
the way the gospel is introduced in a place like China.
When I arrived at the church, the first man I met was a retired linguist teacher from BYU named Robert Blair. He is representing a group bringing business to Utah, and is specifically representing a program to teach 30,000 Chinese to speak English by the time the Olympics come to Beijing in 8 years. We had a very interesting conversation. It turns out his son, Del, and himself were the sacrament meeting speakers. Del gave my kind of talk, comparing prayer to gravity, describing how the effect of gravity is proportional to the distance squared, and describing how prayer can cut down the distance:
He went on to describe how prayer is one of the ways God
can discharge power through us. Pointing out the vector of
gravity is `that we might be one,' and the vector of prayer
and of taking the sacrament is to be one.
Robert Blair, the retired Dad with a shaky hand, also talked on prayer. He focused on the relationship of prayer to covenants, like how in celestial marriage we are placed under covenant by ritual prayer in the temple. Then he contemplated the perfection of Jesus Christ, and how he increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man (Luke 2:52). He pointed out how the perfection of Jesus was never forgetting and always keeping his vows. Prayer provides a repeated test to see if we will keep our vows and covenants. Saying words of prayer, we are tested again and again. Sometimes we let the words of prayer substitute for deeds. The perfection of Jesus Christ is tied to his keeping his vows. Prayer is one way to be reminded of our vows. However, words are easily forgotten. Intent is rationalized.
Joshua faced this problem with the House of Israel when he said `As for me and my house we will worship the Lord.' Israel covenanted to worship the Lord, and so Joshua erected a physical stone or sign of the covenant they made. We have similar physical reminders of our covenants: wedding rings; sacred garments; and prayer reminds us of our covenants. We can not hide our sincerity from God. Prayer is about being sincere. What we may consider trivial, God knows are of eternal consequences. Prayer is so much a part of the air we breathe as Latter-Day Saints, it can become perfunctory. We need to turn the words to perfection. Prayer is a marvel, it is words given by God, if we will listen to the spirit. Prayer gives us an opportunity to re-think and to re-view our covenants. The prayer of desperation in a foxhole is not what prayer is about. We must be as Enos and wrestle with the Lord.
Robert Blair ended his sacrament meeting talk describing a meeting he had with a Chinese scholar who had studied at Oxford for 14 years. The man was in his 80's, and the two of them found themselves alone in the entrance hall of a large library. The scholar described how he had married just before leaving for Oxford, and how during his stay in England he had committed adultery. He described his pain in not being able to teach this good man about how sin is the cancer of the soul, about the atonement and how we can be forgiven, and about the power of prayer. And he closed his talk with a prayer to move the leaders of China to permit the plan of salvation to be taught in China. I guess it is obvious I took a lot of notes at Sacrament Meeting.
I walked from church to the Landmark Tower, where I met Dennis Beliveau, a reservoir engineer from Calgary. We took a cab to PetroChina's offices at RIPID (Research Institute of Petroleum Exploration and Development), where we spent three hours getting oriented. I left early, because I had made arrangements by telephone first thing Sunday morning to meet Mr. Yan Dunshi at our hotel, the Jiang Guang New World Hotel at 4:00. I arrived at 3:55 and so I didn't even go up to the room. Mr. Yan was there at 4:05 and we took off for parts unknown. It was Wednesday when I realized he took me back to the very building I was at, and to a hall in the front of the building for the meetings we had.
To summarize, Mr. Yan has 2 sons and one daughter. About 8 years ago, about when he retired as Chief Geologist for CNPC and went to work as a government official auditing large state-owned businesses like the Coal Ministry, he loaned his oldest son, Yan Jiafeng, some money to start a business. The business is Beijing Hua You Geo Science & Technical Development Ltd., or Geo, and, at least in China has the web site www.geo.com.cn (I have not been able to access their web site yet). They are the only service company in China doing prestack depth migration of seismic data. In addition, they have built a software package called GeoTools, which Dennis tells me is as good as any reservoir characterization / reservoir model building software available in the west. Their closest competition is a Norwegian software package. Sunday evening they gave me a detailed presentation on what GeoTools does, and introduced me to their company. His son-in-law, Ren Dianxing, is a reservoir engineer and works both at RIPID and for Geo. Mr. Ren's wife, Mr. Yan's daughter, is Yan Jiahong, and is a chemist at PetroChina, similar to her mother, who was a geochemist for CNPC. Mr. Yan's youngest son, Yan Jiahong, went to ULL (University of Louisiana at Lafayette, formerly the University of Southwest Louisiana, and studied under Gary Kingsland, whom I have worked with on several different occasions). Mr. Yan's wife was there, along with several of Geo's employees. It took me a couple of visits to put together the family enterprise, and that this business was what Mr. Yan had been planning on me helping him to grow.
I had to leave at 5:15 PM to get to a dinner Bill Jentsch hosted for Dennis Beliveau, Ben, Brian, and myself. I arrived back at the Landmark Tower just in time to meet the others. Ben and Brian had bought me three very nice silk ties. Gray, blue, and red with Chinese characters on. I gave the red one to Rachel last Sunday because she liked it. It was a typical Chinese feast, and Ben and Brian seemed suitably impressed. We took a cab back to the hotel, after walking around the Great Wall Sheridan Hotel for a few minutes. Ben and Brian had discovered counterfeit DVD's, and had a copy of The Twin Towers to watch on Ben's portable DVD player. I maybe lasted 10 minutes before I fell asleep.
Monday morning I was up, had breakfast, and was back up stairs to room 1501 before the boys were up. Ben got in the shower and Brian turned on the television. There were dancers with a stick and a long ribbon on the end of the stick. They were doing synchronous dancing, and it was really pretty with these ribbons forming 3-D sine curves and looking like dragons floating through the sky. Brian pointed out how they are almost perfect, and then explained to me how as a musician/artist he specializes in noticing the little things which are not quite right. He mentioned perfection is not possible. And we had a discussion about being perfect, where I shared my recent insights, without mentioning the church nor the sacrament meeting talk in any way. I learned from the conversation, which I find is often what happens when words and thoughts are being placed in my mind from outside of myself. I call it being taught by The Holy Ghost of the Spirit of Christ. And I have had the honor of having had this happen many times in my life. This particular conversation seemed to be fed by a conversation I still can't quite remember from before leaving Houston.
The new insight to me is the fact perfection is not an event, rather it is a process. The dancers we were watching were perfect in my view, and yet they might not be perfect to someone watching them who knew how synchronous ribbon dancers were suppose to interact. I asked Brian if he thought they were perfect in their dancing a week after they first started to learn. As I recall he said, no. My response is they were perfect, because once they made up their mind it was something they wanted to do, and they started on the process of accomplishing that something, they were perfect. When they chose the first step on the path, they also chose the last. Is it different with anything else we are truly interested in and undertake in our life? Guitar, cello, violin, fatherhood, geophysics, marriage, or anything else we truly commit to, we are perfect when we start, when we end, and all along the process of getting from the beginning to the end. We loose the perfection if we allow ourselves to fall off of the path, either through distraction, appetites, anger, etc. The idea that perfection is a process was a significant insight for me.
So when Ben got out of the shower, I said good-bye and left for the meetings with IBM and PetroChina. We had lunch and dinner provided for us, and we worked until fairly late evening. The boys had all kinds of stories to tell me when I got back, and I will let them tell you the stories in their own words. They were not up when I left on Tuesday morning. Tuesday morning was spent in a large lecture hall listening to a bunch of talks in Chinese. In the afternoon Bill Jantsch gave a long lecture about what he had learned doing the audit for IBM. It was interesting. We ate at RIPED, and had meetings into the evening. I got home after the boys were both in bed and asleep. There was no interaction with my guests at all on Tuesday. Those of you on the list, make sure it is part of your plan to keep yourselves occupied. Guess the boys were tired because of walking around Beijing in the cold.
The cab rides to the RIPED took about 45 minutes. I recall contemplating being perfect while alone in the cab for those daily to and from commutes. I recalled often hear how the church organization is perfect. The people aren't perfect, but the organization is. So why is it constantly changing? The answer is perfection is a process, not an event. It reminded me of a scripture I rediscovered a few months ago in the D&C, which relates directly to Best Practice Documentation and Continuous Improvement, both topics I was talking to the Chinese researchers about each day. The verse is D&C 50:24
I didn't want to preach nor to lecture, and so I saved my
insights for this Thoughtlet. After all, if you aren't
interested in something written in one of these Thoughtlets,
you don't have to read it. If someone is interested, the
words will hopefully prove of value to them, as they have
to me. And although you might not be interested when the
words are written and distributed, they might prove
interesting in 20 years when you are teaching a Sunday
School class about the Sermon on the Mount, and want to
have thoughts to stimulate discussion about being perfect.
Wednesday was my big day. I gave a 4 hour lecture on my vision of where PetroChina should focus R&D efforts in the morning. There were about 60 folks in the room. They were senior R&D scientists from all across China. There were a lot of notes taken, and some discussion between themselves. Not many questions. It took until Friday morning before several of the attendees cornered me and we spent a couple of hours going over parts of my presentation in detail. This interaction was enjoyable. Wednesday afternoon we started to work on the list of R&D projects for the the next 3-5 years. It got bogged down in how the projects were to be classified. It was interesting to watch the Chinese struggle to change they way they do their planning process. PetroChina has about 10% of their stock listed on the New York and Hong Kong stock markets. They are under tremendous pressure to report things in the same manner as western companies. And yet it is very hard to change the way they do things from the communist 5-year planning cycles, which are so obviously controlled by politics. After dinner they told me they needed Thursday morning to regroup, and they would reconvene after lunch.
I called Mr. Yan when I got back to the hotel and arranged to spend Thursday morning with Geo. This was when I learned that their offices are in the front hallway of the building I had been meeting in all week. Really found that to be very funny. We started off with a detailed review of the prestack depth migration projects they have done. Good work. There is a lot of synergy between what they are doing and what David Kessler does. After their presentation, I discussed how Walden 3-D and Dynamic Resources can work together with Geo (for those interested you can review the things we talked about at www.walden3d.com/geo/philosophy.html. We had a very good discussion. Mr. Yan Dun Shi was definitely in charge, and his family were all still involved in the discussion. We went until 1:00, when I was suppose to be back with IBM and PetroChina. It turned out they were not starting until 1:30, and so I had time to go eat. There must have been 30 waitresses in the restaurant, and they were all standing waiting for me to finish. Finally someone asked if I wanted any more, and when I said no they all went and got in line to clean up what was left. It was certainly a different experience.
PetroChina didn't get much further with their discussions on
Thursday afternoon. It is sad to see political maneuvering
and power plays keep folks from taking advantage of an
opportunity. I stayed with it until 5:00, and then I took
off so I could meet the Geo folks. The youngest Mr. Yan
picked up Brian and Ben at the hotel, and Mr. Yan Dun Shi
took me to the restaurant. Mr. Yan and I spent quite a bit
of time talking before everyone else got there. It was a
fun evening. I have included three of the photos below, and the
whole package is located at www.walden3d.com/geo/Photos_030116.
Guitar playing, stories, martial arts demonstrations, etc.
It will be interesting to see what Ben and Brian write about
the evening. Probably the key for me was the detailed plans
Mr. Yan Dun Shi presented describing two major exploration
projects he plans to start working on with us by May of 2003.
It was pretty late when we finally got back to the hotel room.
Friday morning was some of the best interaction I had with the new groups of Chinese. I've already referenced these discussions about the questions they asked. It turns out the group was from one of the Research Institutes Mr. Yan Dun Shi had founded. Paul Brian-Tatham did sign my invoice before I left after lunch on Friday. In the afternoon Mr. Yan Dun Shi took Ben, Brian, my friend from Boeing, Bob Mishler, and me to see a cave a couple of hours south of Beijing. I wasn't expecting much, having been to Carlsbad Caverns a few times. It is a pretty drive, and it was nice to catch up with Bob. Bob and Mr. Yan had an interesting discussion about a new fuel cell based on Curium, a manmade element that is a derivative of Plutonium. According to Mr. Yan, the U.S., Britain, and China have prototype cars that will run on water, creating hydrogen, and burning it in a ceramic engine, with a power source the size of a cigarette package. They are also planning to use it for a new type of helicopter that can move 600 tons at about 1,000 meters elevation, which they also plan to power with this. They are looking for funding. Hopefully if Boeing gets involved there will some kind of a finders fee. I doubt it, though. When we finally got to the cave, it was closed. Everyone had gone home. However, someone found someone to take us on a tour and I was blown away. It is better than Carlsbad in many ways. Six story rooms, with wonderful flowing stalactites. Mr. Yan taught me the relationship to cave growth and sequence boundaries. Look for a detailed discussion in my book: An Open Mind.
It looked like we were going to run out of gas. We didn't. When we got back to Beijing they took us to dinner at The Beijing Duck, the most famous restaurant in Beijing. The owner is a friend. Brian and Ben loved the duck. We each ate eel. Everyone was tired, and so it was not a real late evening. It was a perfect ending to a perfect week. I hope there are many opportunities to do things like this with each of you over the coming months and years.
As often happens when thinking about the things most important to me, my mind wanders to the scriptures. I am reminded of the last verses of the Old Testament, with its promise and warning. It is also a statement about perfection, and how we can not be made perfect without each other. The process tied to becoming perfect involves each of us and all of us:
When I went to church Sacrament meeting Sunday morning with
Grandma Shirts, I wrote another comment about perfection
about perfection in my journal. It was made by Elder D'Var
Bulloch, who recently returned from the Atlanta mission.
He pointed out we have a lay ministry in the church, and
sometimes we get what we pay for. And isn't life like that?
We each do our ribbon dance to the best of our ability, and
the fact we are still part of the act means in some way we
are part of the process that includes faith, repentance,
change, improvement, and when we can see the whole dance
we will understand it is part of being perfect. And the
implication of the following scripture is there is an
event, a state of perfection, after which we have become
part of the process:
I will write about our trip home, and my adventures in
Toquerville, Utah when I get a chance later in the week.
In the mean time, I remind you the words to one of my songs,
Open My Eyes Please - A Prayer (../9807.html), where I talk
about you all and how within your individual spheres, you are
each perfect."