The First Face I'll Ever See

When Fanny Crosby was just six weeks old, a man posing as a doctor applied hot poultices to her infected eyes. The treatment destroyed her sight permanently. She would never see a sunrise, a loved one's face, or the pages of the hymnals she would one day fill.

Yet at age eight, young Fanny wrote these lines: "O what a happy soul I am, although I cannot see. I am resolved that in this world, contented I will be."

That childhood resolve deepened into a lifetime of extraordinary trust. Over the next nine decades, Fanny Crosby composed more than eight thousand hymns, including "Blessed Assurance," "To God Be the Glory," and "Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior." She wrote from a place of radical dependence on the God she could not see but absolutely trusted.

When someone once expressed sympathy for her blindness, Crosby responded with words that still stop us in our tracks: "If I had been given a choice, I would have chosen to be blind, for when I get to heaven, the first face I will ever see will be the face of my blessed Savior."

That is trust distilled to its purest form. Not trust that removes hardship, but trust that reframes it entirely. Fanny Crosby did not trust God in spite of her darkness. She trusted Him so completely that she called the darkness a gift.

The Almighty does not always remove what we wish He would. But He invites us to trust Him so deeply that even our deepest losses become doorways to His presence.