Welcome to my blog! The name, Bright Canaan, comes from an old negro spiritual that our chorus sang 35 years ago. (Listen to my favorite arrangement of the song here.) Slaves in the old South were often taught from the Bible. They couldn’t help but make the parallel between their own plight and the Israelite slaves in Egypt. Their longing for deliverance fostered many songs with the theme of freedom or a journey out of Egypt to a promised land. I’m sure the original intent of this song was to express that desire for relief from bondage and a longing for a place where there would be rest for the weary. For us, the message is more upbeat. We are invited to travel in community to our eternal home. In our Canaan, we will be separated from the toils and cares of mortality, and we will be ushered into eternal green pastures and still waters. My mind doesn’t seem to comprehend this. I tend to focus on what’s here and now and what I can see, feel, or touch. I need to realize that spiritual and eternal realms are both present and as real as the physical world. So together let us leave the bondage of our Egypt (enslavement to sin), and resolutely march to our Promised Land, rejecting the snares and distractions of the wilderness around us!

For a number of years I have been interested in agricultural development, especially as an aid to missions in developing countries. The intent of this blog will be to help and encourage people who are in missions, to share some basic agricultural concepts, and help to find solutions to problems that are ag related. In our world most of us are a generation or more removed from making a livelihood on the land. To those who are having agricultural thoughts without agricultural experience, I hope I can share some perspective from a lifetime of exposure to soil, manure, and the hot sun overhead. Some of you will be bored with posts when they are mostly informational and don’t really apply to your situations. Some posts will hopefully be an encouragement in our walk with God.

Some of the first several posts will be material from earlier writing. Some of you may have read some of these compositions.

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