The Hymn Writer Who Never Needed Her Eyes

Fanny Crosby was six weeks old when a country doctor applied a hot mustard poultice to her inflamed eyes. The treatment was wrong. The damage was permanent. She would never see a single sunrise, never read a page of scripture with her own eyes, never watch a congregation sing the words she had written.

And she wrote thousands of them.

Over the course of her ninety-four years, Crosby composed more than eight thousand hymns, including Blessed Assurance, To God Be the Glory, and Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior. She memorized entire books of the Bible. She stood before presidents and spoke in mission halls on the Bowery. And when well-meaning people expressed sympathy for her blindness, she offered a response that still stops pastors mid-sermon: "If I had a choice, I would still choose to remain blind, for when I die, the first face I will ever see will be the face of my Savior."

That is what healing looks like when the Almighty does it. Not always the reversal of the wound, but the transformation of it. God did not restore Fanny Crosby's sight. He gave her something sight could never provide — a vision of His faithfulness so vivid that darkness itself became a canvas for praise.

Some of you are waiting for God to remove the thing that hurts. Perhaps He intends to do something deeper — to heal not the circumstance, but your sight.