The Pianist Who Never Stopped Playing

Every Sunday morning for forty-three years, Margaret Chen arrived at Grace Community Church in Asheville, North Carolina, precisely twenty minutes before the service. She'd sit at the old Baldwin upright, flex her arthritic fingers, and begin to play. Not because anyone asked her to. Not because she was paid. Because, as she told her pastor, "My hands remember what God has done, even when my mind gets foggy."

At eighty-seven, Margaret's fingers moved slower. She sometimes missed a note in the offertory. But something remarkable happened each week — when she played "Great Is Thy Faithfulness," tears would streak down the faces of people five decades younger. Her worship carried a weight that technical perfection never could, because it was seasoned by forty-three years of showing up, giving thanks, and trusting the Almighty through two lost husbands, breast cancer, and a flood that took her home in 2004.

Margaret was a palm tree. Not flashy, not towering, but deeply rooted and still bearing fruit in old age — still full of sap and green, as the psalmist writes. She declared God's faithfulness every single Sunday not with a sermon but with swollen knuckles on ivory keys.

Psalm 92 reminds us that those planted in the house of the Lord don't retire from praise. They ripen into it. The righteous don't merely survive old age — they flourish through it, their fruitfulness becoming the very evidence that the Most High is faithful.