Fanny Crosby's Joyful Noise

When Frances Jane Crosby lost her sight at six weeks old due to a doctor's botched treatment, no one expected her life would become a sustained hymn of thanksgiving. Yet Fanny Crosby, born in 1820 in Southeast, New York, refused to let blindness silence her praise. At age eight she wrote her first poem: "O what a happy soul I am, although I cannot see. I am resolved that in this world, contented I will be."

She meant it. Over the next nine decades, Crosby composed more than eight thousand hymns, including "Blessed Assurance," "To God Be the Glory," and "Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior." She once told a well-meaning minister who pitied her blindness, "If I had been given a choice at birth, I would have asked to be born blind, because when I get to heaven, the first face I will ever see will be the face of my Savior."

That is the spirit of Psalm 100. "Enter His gates with thanksgiving, and His courts with praise." The psalmist does not command worship from people whose lives are easy. He calls every creature on earth to make a joyful noise to the Lord, to serve Him with gladness, because the Almighty's faithfulness endures to all generations. Fanny Crosby understood what the psalmist knew: gratitude is not the product of favorable circumstances. It is the overflow of a heart that has tasted the goodness of God and found it enough.