When the Music Comes Before the Sight

In 1873, musician Phoebe Knapp sat at her parlor piano and played a new melody for her friend Fanny Crosby. "What does this tune say to you?" Knapp asked. Without hesitation, Fanny replied: "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine. Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine."

What makes those words extraordinary is what Fanny Crosby could not see. She had been blind since she was six weeks old, after a negligent doctor's treatment destroyed her sight permanently. She never saw a sunrise, never read a page of Scripture with her own eyes, never glimpsed the face of a single person she loved.

Yet she wrote over eight thousand hymns — and the recurring theme through nearly all of them was trust. Not a tentative, hoping-for-the-best kind of trust, but the settled confidence of someone who had learned to lean her full weight on the faithfulness of God. She once said, "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 blessed Savior."

That is trust stripped down to its essence. Not trust because everything worked out. Not trust because she could see the path ahead. Trust because she knew the One who held her hand in the dark.

Most of us will never face Fanny Crosby's darkness. But every one of us will face moments when we cannot see what comes next. The question is the same one El Shaddai asks each of us: Can you sing before you see?