NASHVILLE (BP) — Fanny Crosby’s hymns have impacted lives for Christ worldwide for generations, but until recently 2,700 of them were overlooked in an archive, unsung and unpublished.
Now on the album “Blessed Assurance: The New Hymns of Fanny Crosby,” some of those forgotten lyrics have come to life through today’s worship writers and singers, introducing a new generation to one of the most substantive hymn writers of all time.
Fanny Crosby (1820-1915), undaunted by lifelong blindness, was “a songwriter for the people,” Adrian Thompson, vice president of song and artist development at Integrity Music, told Baptist Press. “She wrote songs that the common man really grasped.”
It all happened so quickly. I was shopping at Winco when the phone rang.
In my neighborhood, neighbors come and go, so this move was no different than the others, except it was. It was different because my neighbor had become a friend … thanks to her dog. That is because she needed someone to watch her dog, Prince, while she went to work. As I got to know Prince, I also got to know Josey.
When I was twelve years old, my Grandma died. In some ways, it was a lonely, sad death. At the time, she was living in our home in Eureka, California, under the care of hospice. A grumpy nurse with a this-is-just-a-job attitude stayed at our home the last few days of my Grandma’s life. The day my Grandma died my mother, along with my sister, had travelled to San Francisco for a doctor’s appointment–an appointment that had been made many months in advance. My father was a commercial fisherman and so he was out at sea. I came home from school to find the nurse pacing back-and-forth in front of my house, irritated, waiting for my arrival. She told me that my Grandmother had been taken to the hospital and to get in the car. When I walked into the hospital room my Grandma was in a coma. In the room was an old friend of the family, my “adopted” Grandma Mabel–an older woman in our church who was also friends with my Grandma. I was then promptly ushered out of the room, taken out to eat dinner and returned home without going back to the hospital.
At first glance, some traditions seem small and insignificant and yet they are filled with great importance and are worth passing on from generation to generation. Christians have always observed the AMEN tradition after prayer. I grew up in a home where we said AMEN after each prayer of blessing for our food. Although most Christians remember the AMEN tradition in this way, there is another AMEN tradition that has also remained important to many Christians: singing AMEN at a hymn’s conclusion.