Fanny Crosby was born in 1820 and went blind at six weeks old. She lived ninety-five years and wrote over eight thousand hymns, writing them in her head and dictating them to her stenographer. One might expect bitterness from such a life, but what emerges from Crosby's work is the opposite: a clarity born from deprivation.
Blessed Assurance, written in 1873, is a hymn of ownership and belonging. This is my story, Crosby sings, straightforward and simple. She had no need to dress it up. The assurance she speaks of is not the assurance of sight, which she never had, but the assurance of possession: I am His, and He is mine.
The hymn moves from the personal into eschatology: Watching and waiting, looking above. The last is not mournfulness; the last is hope. A blind woman who had outlived most of her contemporaries could sing of waiting because she had something worth waiting for. The hymn's simplicity makes it seem almost naive until you realize that the simplicity comes from knowing exactly what matters.