“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!”

(Source: The Writer’s Almanac)

It's the birthday of a great writer of hymns, Fanny Crosby, born in Southeast, New York (1820). When she was an infant, she got sick and the family accidentally hired a quack doctor who prescribed mustard plasters on her eyes, and she went blind. Throughout her career, she wrote thousands of hymns. No one knows exactly how many she wrote — the hymnals were hesitant to print too many hymns by one person, so Crosby used about 100 different pseudonyms — but probably between 3,000 and 8,000. Her best-known hymn is "Blessed Assurance," which begins:

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine!
Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!
Heir of salvation, purchase of God,
Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood.