Fanny Crosby: The Blind Woman Who Wrote 8,000 Hymns

Fanny Crosby, blind 19th-century hymn writer who composed over 8,000 hymns including Blessed Assurance
07/01/2026|Rodney Coe|, , ,

When Fanny Crosby was six weeks old, a traveling doctor treated her infected eyes with a hot poultice and left her blind for life. He packed up and left town, and no one ever saw him again. That blind baby would grow up to write more songs the church still sings than almost anyone in history.

The Doctor Who Never Came Back

Born in 1820, Fanny lost her sight before she was two months old. You would expect bitterness. Instead, at age eight she wrote a few lines of verse declaring herself a happy soul who refused to weep over what she could not see. She could not read, so she memorized, committing whole books of the Bible to heart.

Eight Thousand Hymns She Never Saw

Fanny began writing hymns in her forties and could not stop. She composed them in her head and held them in memory until someone wrote them down, more than eight thousand in all, under some two hundred pen names. You have sung her words: “Blessed Assurance,” “To God Be the Glory,” “Rescue the Perishing.” When her friend Phoebe Knapp played a new tune and asked what it said, Fanny answered at once, “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine.”

Walking by Faith, Not by Sight

“For we walk by faith, not by sight,” Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:7. Fanny never resented the doctor who blinded her. She said she would thank him, because her darkness taught her to see Jesus more clearly than most people with perfect eyes. She used to say the first face she would ever see would be her Savior’s.

“For we walk by faith, not by sight.”

2 Corinthians 5:7

What looks like your darkness may be the very room where God is writing your best song. And that, friend, is how God lifts up your day.

Listen to the Take 5 episode

This story is the basis of Take 5 Episode 19 of the Lift Up Your Day daily devotional. Five minutes. Pull up a chair.

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