We shall find that the spheres God brings us into are not meant to
teach us something but to make us something. —Chambers
The original Lindenville was a cabin located in northern California, on mountainous property named The Lord’s Land. We had the privilege of staying in Lindenville twice—the second time was in 1997, on our way out of our old home, California, to our new home, the “thumb” of Michigan. Our times in Lindenville confirmed “the way less traveled” experience of our lives, and it’s what the name continues to signify for us.
Our family is, hands down, our foremost ministry, and intercessory prayer our regular form of service. We opt to keep what we share direct and personal, so no social media for us; our website is the only gateway of information we offer, and easily keep current. In what makes up the rest, we always hope that what we share will encourage and challenge “those who have ears to hear,” as we endeavor to be.
—Russ & Cami
In our Lord’s life, there was none of the press and rush of tremendous activity that we regard so highly, and the disciple is to be as His Master. The central thing about the kingdom of Jesus Christ is a personal relationship to Himself, not public usefulness to men. —Oswald Chambers
Our neighborhood beach: an awe-inspiring sunrise over Lake Huron, as it meets the St. Clair River.
© 2013 Lindenville. All Rights Reserved.
All songs written
by Russ Tapley
Compilation from 4 CD's recorded between '03 and '09. Songs written by Russ and/or Cami Tapley, unless otherwise noted
$10, or whatever you can afford, for each CD
*Keith Green, **Annie Herring, ***Bob Bennett, ****Traditional, "Skeptic's Song" and "Dusty Road" (in playlist) by Daniel Amos
Russ was born in Long Beach, California in 1964, and grew up in Bakersfield. When he was 14, he began playing guitar, singing, and composing his own songs—”Take the Throne,” the last song on “Your Child,” was his first composition.
His first CD, “Your Child” was recorded at the end of 1999, with four other talented musicians he met shortly after moving to Michigan. (Russ’ son, approaching 13 at the time, played the bongos for the title song, “Your Child.”)
Several of Russ’ compositions are instrumentals, inspired by a three month stay with his family on Prince Edward Island, Canada, the winter of 1995.
As is the case with all Russ’ music, some of the recordings are just Russ and his guitar, some have orchestration added by his son. The piano for “The Piano Man” was contributed by Ken Secor, a long-time friend who lives with his wife and two children in southern California.
Russ enjoys picturesque Michigan, especially living so near Lake Huron (shown above with Nim), but sometimes misses California, and travels back annually to visit extended family and to share his music with various groups that are always happy to see him back.
© 2013 Lindenville. All Rights Reserved.
Not long after our first-born daughter died, I remember telling someone, “The deeper the sorrow, the deeper the place that joy can fill.” The comfort of Christ gave this [then] twenty-two year old grieving mother a higher perspective: it caused me to reevaluate my position in this world and my focus here; I could no longer look upon my own gifts and talents as being the measure of my value to God. I began to place less value on things I liked to do and people’s admiration of me, and more value on prayer and ministering to my family and people outside of the religious sector. I found my reward in God’s favor, the “unseen” ministry to the Lord. Essentially, the comfort of Christ introduced me to my purpose.
I’ve mourned deeply since; in dying to the belief that I can do anything right on my own. All of us want to be good—I really believe this—but our inability to be as good as we want to be leads us either to sorrow, or to a hardening of our hearts. To harden our hearts is the popular choice; we can’t be sorrowful all the time, can we?
The world is vehemently opposed to unhappiness, so whatever it takes to feel better is all right “as long as you’re not hurting anyone.” But what does not hurting anyone mean? It’s unbelievable that seventy-percent of young adults today come from broken homes. The “feel good” generation of the 60′s left people confused and empty, without any moral compass. The children of these people have followed in their parents’ footsteps; this definitely qualifies as “hurting someone.” It’s hurt us all. Do we mourn over this?
You may have heard of the illustration of the frog that is thrown into a pot of boiling water; it jumps right out. However, if it’s placed into a pot of tepid water, the temperature can be turned up slowly without the frog ever noticing the change, until it’s cooked to death. The desire for personal happiness has led to a world of people who are afraid to mourn; people who know nothing of the comfort of Christ and His purpose—in other words, “cooked to death.”
“Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For He grew up before Him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of parched ground; He has no stately form or majesty that we should look upon Him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him. He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and like one from whom men hide their face, he was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
“Surely our grief’s He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried; yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed. All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him.
“He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth; like a lamb that is led to slaughter, and like a sheep that is silent before its shearer’s, so He did not open His mouth. By oppression and judgment He was taken away; and as for His generation, who considered that He was cut off out of the land of the living, for the transgression of my people to whom the stroke was due? His grave was assigned with wicked men, yet He was with a rich man in His death, because He had done no violence, nor was there any deceit in His moth.
“But the Lord was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to grief; if He would render Himself as a guilt offering” Isaiah 53:1-10
Isaiah wrote these words seven hundred years before the Word exchanged heavenly majesty for earthly form, to show us the Father, and to die for our sins. Gentleness.
Imagine a starving man entering a restaurant, being seated, handed a menu, and when the waiter comes, the man answers, “Nothing for me.” He had the sense to enter a restaurant, but not the sense to order. For those who will admit they’re hungry and thirsty, many want something less than righteousness to fill them. This will never do; the need is too great. Satisfaction is exclusive, and relative to righteousness.
If all you think of is yourself in a given situation, you will demand your “rights.” The mercy of God knows we deserve nothing but the boiling pot, but gives us our freedom anyway, taking the risk with hope that we will choose what is right. This is God’s intention for mercy; making us free to be His.
Those who are pure in heart stand in its strength, eat of its fruit, revel in its joy. Purity of heart means that you see God! When you’ve seen Him, you know that nothing less than what He offers will satisfy, and no matter how tempting the pleasures of this world appear—whether in worldliness or in religion—you see them as the hollow trap they really are. With a pure heart, your life is a sacrament of holiness when no one is watching, and a thoroughfare of God’s love. No fear. How many live this way? How many are willing to? If you’re not willing, ask God to make you willing to be made willing.
Jesus said there is a kind of peace the world gives which should not be confused with the peace He brings. When it’s time to take on that mess in your closet, disorder is the first sign that peace is coming. So it is with a man’s heart. No matter how much we’d like to get along with everyone all the time—and should as far as it is possible to the end of what is good and right—it isn’t possible when changes need to be made for the good. In the Greek, “peacemaker” is a phrase; “peace” you have “to make.” To make the aforesaid closet a peaceful place, a lot of hard work lies ahead. The sacrifice Jesus made for us on the cross was to make peace between the Father and us, His fallen creation. This, of course, was no simple thing. Neither is being a peacemaker after His example. It denotes the laying down of our comfort to see order restored in others lives.
Doing what is right will put you on a collision course with the world and its ends. If you preach the true gospel, you will in effect be saying: God wants you to lay down your rights, your dreams, your talents, your desires; all the elements of your life; everything He gave you. When you do, He will crush you like a grape to make you sweet wine for others to drink, and a pleasing aroma in His presence. He will use you any way He chooses, even if it “isn’t your gift.” And, He will spend you until you think you haven’t any more to give, to the end that you will return to Him, be filled with Him, and possess all things in Him—Forever is a long, long time!
© Cami Tapley
—Personal testimony via the Beatitudes, Matthew 5
© 2013 Lindenville. All Rights Reserved.
Don’t confuse the move that inspired a decade of Jesus Music, 1969-1979, with the hippie Haight-Ashbury experience of the ’60′s. The Jesus Movement resulted afterward when a generation of seekers didn’t find the peace they were looking for in “free love,” protests, and drugs.
Living in California at the time, we became teens toward the end of the Jesus Movement, and it had a profound affect on us. Actually, it was an equal mixture of the teachings of Oswald Chambers and “Jesus Music” that shaped our personal, Christian ideology. By Chambers we realized that death to self was imperative in order to become disciples of Christ, and in the Jesus Music we were fed pure strains of the only thing that can motivate a soul to this end: what it means to love Jesus devotedly.
Although we lived a couple of hours north of Orange County at the time, we did get to pay a visit or two to Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, but it was well after the hippies had put on their shoes and moved from the floor to pews. Maranatha Music was an extremely successful upstart, and worship music had a new contemporary twist. It was a great time to be a Christian teen. Keith Green played and gave altar calls at Disneyland, and being a “Jesus Freak” was cool.
This page has been constructed with the hope of rekindling the message for those who remember it, and to recap it for those who may have missed out.
Keith Green’s message, “So You Wanna Be a Rock Star?” is a good place to start; it clearly tells the heart of this movement—a message we continue, as a generation, to be in need of hearing and living! Click here.
—Russ & Cami
John Fischer describes the scene of the group’s first leading of congregational praise and worship this way:
“A half a dozen staff members of a church are crammed into this little room no bigger than a walk-in closet, along with five members of a rock group who call themselves ‘Love Song.’ The group is to audition for a Sunday evening service. A few of the thousand-plus people who will come that night are already starting to trickle into the the auditorium downstairs. ‘Could you guys just do a quick song for us right now?’ asks the pastor in charge. ‘You come with high recommendations, but we’ve never heard you before. Would you mind?’ ‘No, not at all,’ says the one with the guitar. With difficulty, he manages, in the press of bodies, to get his guitar horizontal and begins strumming a soft, steady rhythm. Immediately five long-haired heads turn upward and with eyes closed, their voices blend in harmonic symmetry as the haunting strains of ‘Welcome Back’ wash over the unsuspecting staff members from head to toe…When they finish, a hush falls on the room. Unknown to them, these staff members have just heard, in close quarters, what was about to become the signature song of a musical and spiritual revolution. I know this because I was in that room. I was training under one of the pastors at the time—the very one who broke the spell with the understatement of a decade: ‘OK…you’ll do.’”
Welcome back to the things that you once believed in
Welcome back to what you knew was right from the start
All you had to do was to be what you always wanted to be
Welcome back to the love that is in your heart
I know that you thought you could turn your back
And no one could see in your mind
But I can see that you know better now
You never were the untruthful kind
Yeah, and I’m so happy now to welcome you back
Welcome back
Welcome back, (Welcome back to Jesus)
Welcome back
©1971 Dunamis Music
Read more and listen at Love Song Recollections
We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. —C.S. Lewis
Pastor of Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa—his recollection:
“Actually, at the time of the hippie movement, these long-haired, bearded, dirty kids going around the streets repulsed me. They stood for everything I stood against. We were miles apart in our thinking, philosophies, everything.
As their numbers began to grow, God began to lay a burden upon my wife’s heart to reach these kids for Jesus…So, In May of 1968 we rented a little two-bedroom house…By the end of the first week, 21 young fellows had accepted Jesus Christ and moved into the house. By the end of the second week, 35 had accepted the Lord and moved into the house. We had built bunks out into the garage, and they were sleeping wall to wall through the house. One kid was even sleeping in the bathtub.
John Higgins, the elder of the house, called a meeting after the second week. He said, ‘All right, you guys! We’ve got to have a house meeting. Some of you guys have been Christians now for two whole weeks. You’re sitting around here getting fat in the Word. Go out and evangelize! Everyone that’s been a Christian more than a week, split! Get out because we need room to bring in the new Christians.’
Those who had been Christians for over a week had to split. Some of them went out to Tahqultz Canyon and began to witness there. They came across a young girl sitting on a rock reading a Bible. She had a box of oats and tabs of acid. As they started to share Jesus Christ with her, she began to cry. She said, ‘You know, this really blows my mind! I came here two weeks ago to find God. I brought my oats, my acid, my book on Oriental religions, and the Bible. I finished the book on Oriental religions yesterday and started the Bible today. As I started reading, I didn’t understand. I said, “Oh, God, if You’re for real, bring someone along to tell me about it!” Here you guys come up and start telling me about Jesus.’”
Last Days Ministries, Keith & Melody Green
Terry Clark: Catalyst People
Randy Stonehill
Barry McGuire
Chuck Girard
Phil Keaggy
2nd Chapter of Acts
Matthew Ward
Benny Hester
Darrell Mansfield
Kelly Willard
Paul Clark
Nancy Honeytree
First Love dvd’s
© 2013 Lindenville. All Rights Reserved.
To learn more about any of these men and their written works, visit the links provided, and look for their books at your favorite bookseller.
Who is George MacDonald?
Quotes
“How I love that man!” —Oswald Chambers
“I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.” —C.S. Lewis
“The fairy story may be made a vehicle of Mystery. That at least is what George MacDonald attempted, achieving stories of power and beauty when he succeeded.” —J.R.R. Tolkien
THE FIRST OF ALL TRUTHS, which a lifetime of church-going and Bible-reading will fail to disclose, is that for life to be a good thing and worth living, a man must be the child of a perfect Father and know Him. —G.M.
Oswald Chambers: The Man
Daily Devotional: My Utmost For His Highest
“There is no appeal to the emotions, no cant religious phrases, no anecdotes, just a flow of clear convincing reasoning—stark sincerity, speaking with the authority of deep personal experience.”
—Douglas Downes
“That Chambers had little use for spiritual fluff is evident. He deals penetratingly with various ethical, psychological, and philosophical issues, as well as everyday matters.” —Moody Monthly
IT TAKES GOD ALMIGHTY INCARNATE in us to do the meanest duty to the glory of God. It takes God’s Spirit in us to make us so absolutely humanly His that we are utterly unnoticeable. The test of the life of a saint is not success, but faithfulness in human life as it actually is. We will set up success in Christian work as the aim; the aim is to manifest the glory of God in human life, to live the life hid with Christ in God in human conditions. —O.C.
C.S. Lewis Foundation
Into The Wardrobe
THE SWEETEST THING IN ALL MY LIFE has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from.
—Till We Have Faces
Nothing, not even the best and noblest, can go on as it now is. Nothing, not even what is lowest and most bestial, will not be raised again if it submits to death. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. Flesh and blood cannot come to the Mountains. Not because they are too rank, but because they are too weak. What is a Lizard compared with a stallion? Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed. —The Great Divorce
More Quotes:
A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is…A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.
We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right.
Critics who treat “adult” as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.
Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.
Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.
God is not proud…He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him.
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don’t feel at home there?
If these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. Hence both the necessity, and the perennial danger, of “religion.”
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth thrown in. Aim at Earth and you get neither.
The more often a man feels without acting, the less he’ll be able to act. And in the long run, the less he’ll be able to feel.
A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, “darkness” on the walls of his cell.
You cannot go on “explaining away” for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on “seeing through” things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.
Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.
Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, despite your changing moods.
Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.
For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.
Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and can’t really get rid of it.
Surely what a man does when he is caught off his guard is the best evidence as to what sort of man he is.
The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
The absent are easily refuted.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
A great many of those who “debunk” traditional…values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.
Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.
Many things—such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly—are done worst when we try hardest to do them.
Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased.
Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be “given” in the facts of experience.
A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere—”Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,” as Herbert says, “fine nets and stratagems.” God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard.
Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal.
Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire.
There will be two kinds of people in the end: Those that will say to God “Thy will be done” and those to whom God will say “Thy will be done.”
Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won`t last forever. We must take it or leave it.
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey “people.” People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one.
© 2013 Lindenville. All Rights Reserved.
© 2013 Lindenville. All Rights Reserved.