God Reaches Out to Find Us
During an Aug. 4 Sunday school class at National Presbyterian Church, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice described how she had drifted from her Christian faith -- and how God reached out and brought her back:
"I was a preacher’s kid, so Sundays were church, no doubt about that. The church was the center of our lives. In segregated black Birmingham of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the church was not just a place of worship. It was the place where families gathered; it was the social center of the community, too.
"Although I never doubted the existence of God, I think like all people I’ve had some ups and downs in my faith. When I first moved to California in 1981 to join the faculty at Stanford, there were a lot of years when I was not attending church regularly. I was traveling a lot. I was a specialist in international politics, so I was always traveling abroad. I was always in another time zone. One Sunday I was in the Lucky’s Supermarket not very far from my house -- I will never forget -- among the spices and an African-American man walked up to me and said he was buying some things for his church picnic. And he said, ’Do you play the piano by any chance?’
"I said, ’Yes.’ They said they were looking for someone to play the piano at church. It was a little African-American church right in the center of Palo Alto. A Baptist church. So I started playing for that church. That got me regularly back into churchgoing. I don’t play gospel very well -- I play Brahms -- and you know how black ministers will start a song and the musicians will pick it up? I had no idea what I was doing and so I
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