August 27, 2002

CONDI PLAYS IN C :

Walking in faith (Condoleeza Rice, August 4, 2002, Washington Times)
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 centerof 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 called my mother, who had played for Baptist churches.

"Mother," I said, "they just start. How am I supposed to do this?" She said, "Honey, play in C and they'll come back to you." And that's true. If you play in C, people will come back. I tell that story because I thought to myself, "My goodness, God has a long reach." I mean, in the Lucky's Supermarket on a Sunday morning.


As Mike Daley who sent this said, forget VP, she should be President one day. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 27, 2002 8:57 PM
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