Psalm 92:12-14

12 The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree. He will grow like a cedar in Lebanon.

13 They are planted in Yahweh’s house. They will flourish in our God’s courts.

14 They will still produce fruit in old age. They will be full of sap and green,

World English Bible, public domain

An old tree that still bears fruit is the picture at the heart of these three verses. Psalm 92 says that people who live rightly will “still produce fruit in old age” (Psalm 92:14). It adds that they will stay “full of sap and green” (Psalm 92:14) long after you might expect them to dry out.

The psalm reaches for two trees its first listeners knew well. The palm keeps standing and giving fruit in hot, dry country. The cedar of Lebanon grows slowly, stands tall and was famous for lasting. The psalm then says these lives are planted in God’s house, rooted somewhere steady. It does not claim that age brings no losses. It says the years do not have to empty a person out. Something can keep rising in you, the way sap rises in a tree each spring, even when the bark has gone rough.

That is a gentle thought to bring to a page. Many of us carry a quiet worry that our useful years are behind us, or that getting older mostly means getting smaller. The psalm offers another way to see it, as an image to sit with and not a rule to prove. You can wonder what you are still growing, and what you still have to give, whether or not you share the psalmist’s faith.

Think, for example, of an old apple tree at the back of a yard. Its trunk is split and leaning, a few branches are bare, and nobody remembers who planted it. Still, every fall, it drops apples in the grass, and the neighbor kids come with buckets. Or picture a grandfather in his garage, showing a teenager how to sharpen a chisel, slowly, the way he learned it 60 years ago. That is fruit nobody could buy.

Your fruit in this season might look like that. It could be patience, a story, a skill passed on, a phone call to someone lonely, or a prayer for a person who does not know you pray for them. It may be small. It still counts.

Before you write

Start by remembering one tree you have known, in a yard, a park or a field from childhood. Write a single sentence about how it looked in its later years. Let that sentence carry you into whichever prompt below sits closest to your own season. For more on this theme, the aging prompts offer other ways in.

Journal prompts

  1. The psalm pictures a life that is still full of sap and green. Where do you feel something still rising in you this year?

  2. Think of an older person who kept bearing fruit late in life. What did their fruit actually look like, in small daily ways?

  3. What have the years taken from you, and what have they given you that you could not have had at 25?

  4. Write an honest prayer about growing older, including any fear, grief or impatience you carry about it.

  5. When prayer or hope feels dry, a tree in winter can be a way in. Describe one, and ask what might be happening beneath the bark that no one can see.

  6. The palm and the cedar are planted somewhere steady. Where do you feel rooted right now, and where do you feel loose or transplanted?

  7. Name one skill, story or kindness you could pass on to someone younger. Who could receive it this week?

  8. What would change if you believed you still have something to give, even on your slowest days?