The Story behind: "All the Way My Savior Leads Me" Hymn

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Some call it coincidence. Others know better. When one is led by the Lord, truly amazing things happen. When we trust in the Lord with all our hearts, when we acknowledge him in all our ways, he will direct our paths.

That certainty lies behind this hymn, one of thousands penned by Fanny Crosby. You might call her the poet laureate of the evangelical church in the 1800s. Her output was outstanding: songs of faith and commitment even in hard times. “Blessed Assurance,” “He Hideth My Soul,” “Draw Me Nearer,” “To God Be the Glory”—these and many other lyrics celebrate the Christian’s relationship of trust with a trustworthy Lord.

The sweetness of Fanny Crosby’s outlook is all the more amazing when we consider that she was blinded as a young child through medical negligence. She studied at the New York Institution for the Blind and later taught there. She married a blind musician who was also at that school.And she became the most prolific hymnwriter of her time.

Yet on one occasion in 1875, Fanny Crosby needed money to pay the rent, and she was five dollars short. Yes, she earned money from her hymn texts, but she regularly donated to worthy causes—especially rescue missions in New York City. If she didn’t need the money for basic expenses, she would give it away. As a result, she and her husband hadn’t settled down in a house of their own but lived in a series of rented apartments in New York.

Fanny prayed, and as she got up from her knees, there was a knock at the door. A man she didn’t know handed her five dollars and left. “I have no way of accounting for this,” she wrote later, “except to believe that God, in answer to my prayer, put it in the heart of this good man to bring the money to me. My first thought was, It is so wonderful the way the Lord leads me.”

That led to a song. On this, as on many other occasions, Fanny Crosby experienced “heavenly peace, divinest comfort.” She knew the truth that Jesus does all things well.