This template was designed by Heather over at Graced by Christ based on a photograph I sent her.

The picture in my header was taken from Highway 183 in central Nebraska just north of where it intersects with Highway 2 near Ansley, Nebraska. Highway 2 was considered by the late Charles Kuralt, an award winning American journalist, to be “one of America’s ten most beautiful highways.”

This road will take you to one of the last unexplored frontiers where vast treasures can be discovered.

Mile after mile, you travel through these rolling hills of mixed prairie which makes up a quarter of this state, with only occasional reminders of civilization.

These are the Nebraska Sandhills, a geologically unique area. Despite the grasses waving in the ever present Nebraska wind, this is actually a sand sea, the largest in the Americas. As much as 85% of this unique ecoregion is preserved and largely untouched because, without extensive irrigation, agricultural development is difficult.

It is not, however, impossible. If you turn on the radio while driving through, you will find out the price of a bushel of corn, a little about cattle futures and the rainfall so far this year. Irrigation takes place by redirecting some of the water from our few rivers and through the digging of wells, but persistent drought has taken its toll, endangering some of our rivers and streams. Many farmers are returning to dryland farming, an agricultural method which works with the environmental conditions of our state.

So what does that have to do with Principled Discovery? A lot, actually.

1. I live in Nebraska, I love Nebraska, and I wanted something related to this great state in the heartland.

2. The fragile ecosystem reminds me of my tagline. At the turn of the century, the farming practices which contributed to the bounty of the “bread basket” also stripped the land of its natural cover which protected it from wind erosion. All it took was one year of drought and one good wind to blow an inch of topsoil away and begin to turn the Bread Basket of the World into the Dust Bowl. The foundations had been destroyed.

3. The sand itself calls to mind one of my favorite hymns.

On Christ the solid rock I stand
All other ground is sinking sand.

4. In few pursuits is our dependence on water more clear than in agriculture. The windmills dotting the sandhills represent this struggle as the wind turns them, drawing up water. Christ called Himself Living Water, and promised that if we drink from it, we will not thirst again.

This blog is about foundations.  False foundations and strong foundations.  It is about how we set a foundation for our lives and primarily about how to set a foundation in our children’s lives…through education.  Through homeschooling.