Blessed Assurance in the Dark

Fanny Crosby was six weeks old when a country doctor's failed treatment destroyed her sight permanently. She would never see a sunrise, never read a printed page, never watch the faces of the people she loved.

She wrote over eight thousand hymns.

Among them was Blessed Assurance, penned in 1873 when her friend Phoebe Knapp sat down at the piano, played a new melody, and asked, "What does this tune say?" Without hesitation, Fanny answered: "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine! Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!"

What strikes me is not the speed of her response but the depth of it. A woman who had never seen the world called her life a foretaste of glory. She trusted that what she could not see was more real than what sighted people took for granted every day.

When asked if she ever resented her blindness, Crosby said she was grateful for it — because the first face she would ever see would be the face of her Savior.

That is trust at its most radical. Not trust that God will remove the hardship, but trust that the Almighty is present within it. Not trust that we will get what we want, but trust that what El Roi — the God Who Sees — has given us is already enough.

When the road ahead is dark and you cannot see the next step, Fanny Crosby's life whispers back across the centuries: blessed assurance does not require blessed sight. It only requires a Savior worth trusting.