6. Blessed Assurance

The Story Behind the Hymn

Fanny Crosby was blinded by a doctor’s medical error when she was just six weeks old. Despite this, she went on to become perhaps the most prolific hymn writer in the history of Christianity, credited with somewhere between eight and nine thousand hymn texts over her lifetime.

Publishers worried that hymnals would look strange with so many songs credited to a single author, so Crosby wrote under dozens of different pen names. Many congregations unknowingly sang several of her hymns within the same service.

This particular hymn came together almost instantly. Her friend Phoebe Palmer Knapp visited one afternoon and played a new tune she had composed on the piano, asking Crosby what she thought it seemed to say.

Crosby is said to have answered right away, ‘Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine,’ and to have finished the rest of the text in that same sitting — fitting words to an existing melody, the reverse of her usual method of writing the text first.

Crosby lived in relative poverty for much of her life despite her enormous fame, often giving away her royalty payments to home missions serving New York City’s poor, where she also visited rescue missions in person well into old age.

She stayed remarkably mentally active as she aged, reportedly still composing new hymns in her nineties, decades after this one had already made her name widely known.

Crosby died in 1915 at the age of ninety-four. This hymn’s confident refrain, ‘this is my story, this is my song,’ is often singled out as the clearest expression of the steady faith she maintained across a life that included blindness from infancy and, for most of her adult years, genuine financial hardship.