Just wanted to quickly update everyone (now that I managed to get verbal confirmation last night over the phone with the publisher) that I am now an “official” column writer of sorts for a small local community paper in my hometown, Columbus, Ohio, the “Ohio Chinese American News.”

I’m excited because I am no longer “on my own” is this endeavor to brush off some of my academic background and practice putting it to use again in a context that is “just challenging enough” for me…so it is like a perfect “stepping stone” placed before me in what seems like perfect timing…a manageable next step.

I am receiving–and seizing–this opportunity as a gift from Heaven =)

From my understanding, this paper is owned and operated as a community service project for the local Chinese community by a good friend of my parents, and has been printing bi-weekly for many many years now (Ivan and I made it to the front cover when we held a wedding reception there ten years ago, and the memoir I wrote for my brother Tim in April made it to the back cover).

While I don’t have to feel overwhelmed or over-intimidated, there is a greater level of accountability to keep me going as I have agreed to write an article every two weeks for the next year or two. It isn’t a paid gig (but it also doesn’t cost me anything to publish to an audience that has been pre-established and which is ideal for the content I want to produce)–which means I am committing to being committed as opposed to needing to worry about performance at this point.  Perfect for my current circumstances.

This new project is also really feeling like I’m finally getting to take the research project I started many years ago on “Parent-adolescent Communication in Chinese (North) American Families,” and finish the steps of giving back to the original community that helped me jumpstart it.

I had begun it in Columbus, Ohio the year after my undergraduate studies at the Ohio State University, intending to provide some kind of newsletter or handbook for the parents and teens that participated in the project.  However, as I was unable to easily find enough research participants, and then moved to Vancouver, B.C., Canada to attend Regent College where there were many many Chinese families living in North America, I ended up “completing” it as my Masters Thesis at Regent.  In that time, I also got married, got busy with my full-time ministry job, and then got busy starting my family (mixing in a couple administrative jobs along the way)…

So, in short, my “intentions” of giving the research back to Columbus, Ohio, sadly never happened. But now it finally will  =)

I am also taking this opportunity to practice building a second website to coincide with the column: www.chineseamericanfamilies.com. I am figuring out the steps of building a site again, as well as playing around with a different template, which is a bit exciting for me as I have often felt like I don’t know what I’m doing with this website as I’m fumbling through and experimenting for the first time. But I find that when I do something a second (and especially a third) time, I generally naturally pick up more and more without having to think too hard or sit through a course etc. which I can’t really handle at this point.

I think this column and my second website will also be good for me because there is an actual “focus” topics-wise, and a “focused” audience….and also after my first conversation with Dr. Jung Jing the publisher, there are parameters being set that will hold me accountable to just “being more focused” in general as I go (i.e. need to learn to stick to a 500-600 word count per column).

Anyhow, that is all for now.  Just wanted to share cause this is something I’ve been pretty excited about for these last few weeks.

And also hoping that perhaps this can be an encouragement that sometimes dreams/plans from the past that you were perhaps asked and then ready to let go of for a season have a way of working themselves back into our lives…when timing, circumstances and your own heart’s desires align in surprising ways   =)

Perhaps when I “see” it in print (hopefully my parents can grab a copy and figure out how to send me a photo of it?), then I can share that as well as proof…