When the Music Comes Before the Words

In 1873, a wealthy composer named Phoebe Knapp sat down at the piano in her Brooklyn mansion and played a new melody for her friend Fanny Crosby. When the last notes faded, Knapp turned and asked, "What does this tune say?"

Without hesitation, Fanny replied, "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine. Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine."

What makes this moment extraordinary is what Fanny Crosby could not see — literally. She had been blind since she was six weeks old, after a mustard poultice applied by an incompetent doctor destroyed her sight permanently. She never saw a sunset, never read a page of scripture with her own eyes, never looked into the face of a friend.

Yet when asked what the music said, she didn't hear uncertainty. She heard assurance. She didn't compose a song about longing or doubt. She wrote about possession — "Jesus is mine" — and about a story that was already submitted and already told.

Fanny Crosby went on to write over eight thousand hymns, and the thread running through nearly all of them is not sight but trust. She once said, "It seemed intended by the blessed Providence of God that I should be blind all my life, and I thank Him for the dispensation."

Trust does not require understanding. It does not demand that we see the road ahead. Sometimes the Almighty gives us a melody before He gives us the words, and our only task is to listen closely enough to sing what He has already written on our hearts.