The Blind Woman Who Saw More Clearly Than Anyone

When Fanny Crosby was just six weeks old, a country doctor placed hot mustard poultices on her infected eyes. The treatment destroyed her sight permanently. She would never see a sunrise, a human face, or a printed page of music.

Yet over the course of her ninety-four years, Crosby composed more than eight thousand hymns — among them Blessed Assurance, To God Be the Glory, and Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior. Songs that have carried millions of believers through their darkest valleys.

What stuns most people is what Crosby said about her blindness. She did not rage against it. She called it a gift. "I could not have written thousands of hymns," she once explained, "if I had been hindered by the distractions of seeing all the interesting and beautiful objects that would have been presented to my notice."

And then she said something that should stop every one of us mid-breath: "When I get to heaven, the first face that shall ever gladden my sight will be that of my Savior."

Sometimes we beg the Almighty for healing that looks like restoration — give us back what we lost. But the God who heals is also the God who transforms. He does not always remove the wound. Sometimes He fills it with a song.

If you are carrying something today that feels permanent and unfair, take heart. El Roi, the God Who Sees, may be composing something through your darkness that the world desperately needs to hear.