The original inspiration for this blog’s name is because I attended a school where the mascot was the Pioneer (technically a cheesy fuzz-ball creature in school colors called Reenoip–Pioneer spelled backward) & I liked my personal connection to the word & to the implied Pioneer Spirit.  Also, I am the first born child in my family so have pioneered the path of life for my siblings & myself.  Additionally, as a family historian, I am drawn to the concept & romanticism of The Pioneers.  Historically these were hearty (an accidental & fortuitous misspelling of “hardy”) & adventurous folks who were willing to brave the unknown in order to stake out a place for themselves & their posterity in a wild & untamed land.  Our physical land may be rather more tamed nowadays, but our internal world can still be unfettered, as can our insights & views be wild & free…

 

 

Within this blog I hope to pioneer the expression of my own perspectives on a number of topics.  At the beginning of this venture, I plan to provide some historical perspective on churches, schools, & communities in my personal & ancestral past.  This will perhaps include insight & analysis of certain aspects of those places, the people, & some practices associated with them either from personal experience or through the observation of others.  Some of this perspective is hoped to be therapeutic in nature, a way to gain distance from painful experiences & to understand a bit about personalities, trends, time-frames, & organizational/institutional biases that might have contributed to various conditions & challenges that may still be impacting me or my family….

I was initially inspired to blog in this direction during the process of helping my mother set up her blog, SongBirdTuller.wordpress.com.  In the course of demonstrating examples of info she might be interested in I showed her how to do an image search on Bing.com, copy/paste the image elsewhere, and review the source location of the image for further info.  I chose to look up her church of more than 40 years now.  Going to the source page of a particular image provided a seemingly interesting perspective on a particular era in modern church history.  Since I’ve had a number of personal “issues” with my parents’ church over the years the concept of blogging as a form of therapy in this (& possibly other) arena(s) was conceived…

Additionally, I recently read the book The Underground Railroad for a book study group I’ve begun attending.  The coordinating librarian had asked me to look up some info related to our locality, the Underground Railroad, and the Michigan Republican Party.  The nexus of that research also inspired me to want to dig a bit deeper into this topic, first to take some degree of regional pride in certain historical heroics.  Later on, I hope to make some familial historical connections to some of that abolitionist background so that there may be a new avenue of taking historical pride in the achievements & motivations of our forbears & to inspire our coming generations to dream & live in ways that are pleasing to the Lord & to further provide for His Kingdom’s work on this earth!

I hope you enjoy what ultimately gets shared here within these posts.  I’d love to hear from you in feedback if you are so inclined…& may God bless us, every one!