A Gift She Refused to Return

In 1873, Phoebe Knapp sat at her piano in Brooklyn and played a new melody for her friend Fanny Crosby. "What does this tune say?" she asked. Without pause, Fanny began to sing: "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!"

Fanny Crosby had been blind since infancy. At six weeks old in Southeast, New York, a misapplied poultice destroyed her sight permanently. Yet she never spoke of her blindness as a loss. By the mid-1870s, she was the most prolific hymn writer in America, composing texts at such a pace that publishers asked her to use pen names — she would eventually use over two hundred — so that no single hymnbook appeared dominated by one author. Over the course of her ninety-four years, she wrote more than eight thousand hymns.

What astonished those who knew her was not her output but her outlook. "If I had a choice," she once declared, "I would still choose to remain blind, for when I die, the first face I will ever see will be the face of my blessed Savior."

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 that we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. Fanny Crosby lived that verse with a literalness few of us will ever know. She teaches us that faith is not the absence of hardship but the refusal to let hardship define what we see. When we stop mourning what we have lost and start looking toward what God has promised, even our deepest limitations become doorways to glory.