The Hymn Writer Who Refused to Be Defined by Darkness

Fanny Crosby lost her sight as an infant due to a doctor's error. She would never see a sunset, a page of sheet music, or the face of anyone she loved. By every measure of her era, her identity was fixed: blind girl, object of pity.

But at eight years old, Crosby wrote a poem that stunned the adults around her: "Oh, what a happy soul I am, although I cannot see. I am resolved that in this world, contented I will be. How many blessings I enjoy that other people don't. To weep and sigh because I'm blind, I cannot, and I won't."

She had already decided who she was — and blindness wasn't it.

Over the next nine decades, Crosby composed more than eight thousand hymns, including Blessed Assurance and To God Be the Glory. When someone once expressed sympathy for her condition, she replied that if she could ask the Almighty for one gift, she would not ask for sight — because when she died, the first face she would ever see would be the face of her blessed Savior.

Fanny Crosby understood something the world still struggles with: your circumstances describe your situation, not your soul. The world will hand you an identity based on what you lack. The Most High gives you an identity based on whose you are. And that identity — beloved, chosen, purposed — no darkness can take from you.