The Hymn Writer Who Never Stopped Singing

Fanny Crosby lost her sight at six weeks old due to a doctor's error. She never regained it. Yet by the time she reached her nineties, she had written over eight thousand hymns — songs like Blessed Assurance, To God Be the Glory, and Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior — that have been sung by millions across every continent.

When asked if she resented her blindness, Crosby famously replied that it was the best thing that could have happened to her. "When I get to heaven," she said, "the first face that shall ever gladden my sight will be that of my Savior."

She wrote her first hymn at age forty-four. Her last at ninety-four. In the decades between, she rose before dawn nearly every morning to pray and compose, declaring the steadfast love of the Most High before the sun was up. Even in her final years, living in a modest Bridgeport tenement, she gave away almost everything she earned to missions and the poor. Visitors found her not diminished but radiant — still full of sap and green, as the psalmist would say.

The righteous flourish like the palm tree. They still bear fruit in old age. Fanny Crosby could not see the sunrise, but every morning she made one — lifting melodies of thanks to the God she called her Rock. Her life was living proof that those planted in the house of the Lord do not wither. They sing.