Fanny Crosby's Hymn Written in the Dark

When Fanny Crosby was six weeks old, a quack doctor's poultice destroyed her sight forever. She would never see her mother's face, never watch a sunset over the Connecticut hills, never read a single word of Scripture with her own eyes. Yet at the age of eight, she composed a short poem that would define her life: "Oh, what a happy soul I am, although I cannot see. I am resolved that in this world, contented I will be."

That resolve deepened into something far richer than contentment. Over her ninety-four years, Crosby wrote more than eight thousand hymns, each one a declaration of trust in the God she could not see but knew intimately. She once told a minister, "If I had been given a choice at birth, I would have asked to be blind, because when I get to heaven, the first face I will ever see will be the face of my Savior."

She did not need physical sight to know God's paths. Every morning she knelt in her small Manhattan apartment and asked the Lord to guide her pen. The hymns that poured out — "Blessed Assurance," "All the Way My Savior Leads Me" — became the prayers of millions.

The psalmist wrote, "Show me Your paths, Lord, teach me Your ways." Fanny Crosby proved that when we lift our souls to God, He leads us not by what we can see, but by the steady, covenant love that has never once failed.