Erin Bottger (Bouma)

“Wholeness is the goal [of life], but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.”
― Parker J. Palmer, On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old

“The old rules no longer applied but new ones were not yet clearly defined, leaving those with authority or power to determine what was acceptable.”
― Kenneth Maher, Wind of Change: An American Journey in Post-Soviet Russia

“I remember a young man coming to see me when he had just left school and begun work in London. He had given up going to church, he said, because he could not say the creed without feeling that he was a hypocrite. He no longer believed it. When he had finished telling me what he thought, I said to him, ‘If I were to answer your problems to your complete intellectual satisfaction, would you be willing to change the way you live?’ He smiled slightly and blushed. The answer was clearly ‘No’. His real problem was not intellectual but moral. This, then, is the spirit in which our search must be conducted. We must set aside apathy, pride, prejudice and sin, and seek God – no matter what the consequences. Of all these hindrances to the search for truth, the last two are the hardest to overcome: intellectual prejudice and moral self-will. The reason is that both are expressions of fear – and fear is the greatest enemy of the truth.”
― John R.W. Stott, Basic Christianity

“The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion