You know she retired in April.  (See photos.)  You know she's helped make our spiritual lives heavenly with her organ music for the past eight years.  But did you know about the rest of her half century in music?

Emily Borling is a native of Minnesota, a graduate of Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington (Bachelor of Music in organ) and Indiana University where she received her Master of Music degree in organ performance with High Honors.

Highlights of her 50-plus years as an organist include her Evensong organ recital at Washington National Cathedral and appearing on Minnesota
Public Radio's nationally broadcast Pipedreams program that featured the new Fisk-Rosales Organ at Rice University.
 

Over the years, Emily has served congregations in Portland, Oregon, Tacoma, Washington, and Ft. Lewis Washington.  She's taught at Waldorf College in Forest City, Iowa and at Mt. St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas.  As an organist she has appeared as a recitalist in the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and in Texas.
 

While a doctoral student at the Shepherd School of Music, Rice University, and before coming to First Congregational Church, she served numerous Houston  congregations of various denominations. At Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church, she was organist, associate director of music and founder of a graded handbell choir program.  Two of the five handbell choirs there were featured on a CD, and the high school handbell choir scored an overseas trip one year.

For eight years Emily held offices, including chair, in the Texas-Oklahoma Area IX, American Guild of English Handbell Ringers. Recently the handbell festival FebFest, held in Houston every year since 1988, honored Emily with a 20^th Anniversary Founders Plaque.
 

Her most spectacular act precipitating a leave of absence prior to settling in with First Congregational the last Sunday of 2000?  She broke a finger in April of that year!