The Woman Who Saw What Sighted Eyes Missed

When Fanny Crosby was six weeks old, a country doctor's careless poultice left her permanently blind. By every measure of nineteenth-century America, her life was a wilderness — a young girl navigating a world she would never see. Yet at the New York Institution for the Blind, something remarkable began to bloom.

By age eight, Fanny had memorized the first five books of the Bible. By twenty-three, she was addressing the United States Congress. And over her ninety-four years, she composed more than eight thousand hymns — songs like "Blessed Assurance" and "To God Be the Glory" that have carried millions along the highway of worship for over a century.

When asked if she resented her blindness, Crosby's answer stunned listeners: "If I had been given a choice at birth, I would have chosen to be blind, because the first face I will ever see will be the face of my Savior."

Isaiah saw it centuries before Fanny lived it: "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened... and the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing, with everlasting joy upon their heads." What the prophet promised was not merely physical healing but a complete reversal of sorrow — the desert of human limitation transformed into a garden of divine purpose. Fanny Crosby's life was that desert in bloom, singing all the way home.