Me: It is a perfect day to be outside.
Prodigal: I agree.
Me: I wanted to share more about some amazing women.
Prodigal: I think that you should.
This is from the book Great Women of the Christian Faith by Edith Deen
Fanny Crosby wrote the astonishing number of more than eight thousand religious poems, many of which have been set to music and distributed by the millions in English-speaking countries. Among her best known hymns are : Jesus, Keep Me Near the Cross,” Draw Me Nearer,” Blessed Assurance,” Rescue the Perishing,” “I Am Thine, O Lord” and “All the Way My Savior Leads Me.”
Born in southeast Putnam County, New York, on March 24, 1820, Fanny Crosby became blind at the age of six weeks during a sickness. As a young girl she joined the Old St. John Methodist Church in New York City. At the age of fifteen she entered the New York Institute for the Blind, where she received an excellent education. She later taught there.
“Blindness can not keep the sunlight of hope from the trusting soul, ” she wrote in later life. “One of the earliest resolves that I formed in my young and joyous heart was to leave all care to yesterday, and to believe that the morning would bring forth its own peculiar joy.”
In 1858 she married Alexander van Alstyne, who was also blind. He was an organist in two New York City churches, and his co-operation and musical knowledge contributed greatly to her success. Their united lives made harmony for forty-four years until his death in 1902.
Fanny Crosby’s “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” was one of the first American hymns to be translated into numerous foreign languages. Among others found in almost every hymnbook are : “Jesus Is Tenderly Calling Thee Home, ” “Savior More Than Life,” “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Saviour” and “Jesus Is Mine.”
From 1865 to 1905 she produced nearly two hundred songs each year. She died in 1915 at the age of ninety-five after giving fifty-one years of her life to enriching the Christian hymnology.
For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
2 Peter 1:8
Jennifer Van Allen
www.theprodigalpig.com
www.faithincounseling.org
