The First Face I'll Ever See

Fanny Crosby lost her sight at six weeks old when a doctor's mistake left her permanently blind. She might have spent her life defined by that loss. Instead, she wrote more than eight thousand hymns, including Blessed Assurance, To God Be the Glory, and Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior.

But the most revealing moment of her life wasn't a hymn she penned. It was something she said. When a well-meaning minister expressed pity for her blindness, Crosby responded: "If I had been given a choice at birth, I would have asked to be blind, because when I get to heaven, the first face I will ever see will be the face of my Savior."

That is a woman who knew exactly who she was — and Whose she was.

The world will always try to define you by what you lack. By the diagnosis, the failure, the thing that went wrong. But Fanny Crosby refused to let her limitation become her identity. She didn't deny her blindness. She simply would not let it narrate her story. She let God do that instead.

Paul wrote, "We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen" (2 Corinthians 4:18). Crosby lived those words more literally than most of us ever will.

Your identity is not the worst thing that happened to you. It is the best thing the Almighty says about you — that you are His, known and beloved, with a story only He can write.