The Hymn Writer Who Thanked the Dark

When Fanny Crosby was six weeks old, a man posing as a doctor applied hot poultices to her inflamed eyes. The treatment destroyed her sight permanently. She would never see a sunrise, a human face, or the pages of the Bible she came to love.

Yet Crosby refused bitterness. She believed the Almighty had allowed her blindness for a purpose she could trust even when she could not see it — literally or figuratively. That trust produced astonishing fruit. Over 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 once told a reporter that if given the choice, she would still choose to remain blind — because when she died, the first face she would ever see would be the face of her blessed Savior.

There is a kind of trust that only deepens in the dark. It does not demand explanations. It does not require that God show us the whole road before we take the first step. It simply sings, as Crosby sang, "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine."

The Most High does not always remove what we wish He would. But He invites us to trust that what we cannot see, He is already using. Sometimes our deepest songs are born not in spite of the dark, but because of it.