The Hymn Writer Who Thanked God for Blindness

Fanny Crosby was six weeks old when a country doctor in Southeast, New York, applied a hot mustard poultice to her infected eyes. The treatment destroyed her sight permanently. For ninety-five years, she never saw a sunrise, a human face, or the words on a printed page.

When people expressed pity, she refused it. When asked about the doctor whose error blinded her, she said something remarkable: "If I could meet him now, I would say thank you, thank you — because it was through his mistake that I have lived in the light of God's love."

That light poured out in over eight thousand hymns — Blessed Assurance, To God Be the Glory, Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior. Congregations across the world sang words composed by a woman who had never once read a hymnal.

The Pharisees in John 9 looked at a man born blind and saw only a theological problem — whose sin caused this? Jesus saw something entirely different: an occasion for the glory of God to be displayed. The religious leaders had perfect eyesight yet couldn't recognize the Messiah standing three feet in front of them. A blind beggar, freshly healed, saw more clearly than the whole Sanhedrin.

Fanny Crosby understood what those Pharisees never could — that God doesn't waste our darkness. He fills it with a light the sighted often miss.