Sight She Never Wanted Back

Fanny Crosby was blind from the age of six weeks, the result of a country doctor's mistake when he treated an eye infection with the wrong remedy. For most of her long life — she lived to ninety-four — she never saw a sunrise, a human face, or the pages of the Bible she loved.

Yet Fanny Crosby wrote more than eight thousand hymns. Blessed Assurance. To God Be the Glory. Rescue the Perishing. Words that have shaped the faith of millions across generations.

Late in life, someone expressed sympathy for her blindness. Her response stopped them cold. "If I could meet the doctor who made that mistake," she said, "I would thank him. If I had not lost my sight, I might never have written the hymns."

She genuinely believed her limitation was not a detour from her purpose — it was the road to it.