National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, 47, told this story at an August 4, 2002, Sunday School class at National Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C.:

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 a specialist in international politics, so I was always traveling abroad…. [One] Sunday morning, I went to Menlo Park Presbyterian Church [in Palo Alto]. The minister that Sunday morning gave a sermon I will never quite forget. It was about the Prodigal Son from the point of view of the elder son.

It set the elder son up not as somebody who had done all the right things but as somebody who had become so self-satisfied; a parable about self-satisfaction, and content and complacency in faith [and] that people who didn't somehow expect themselves to need to be born again can be complacent. I started to think of myself as that elder son who had never doubted the existence of God but wasn't really walking in faith in an active way anymore.

I started to become more active with the church, to go to Bible study and to have a more active prayer life. It was a very important turning point in my life.