Lottie Moon: She Gave Everything She Had
Charlotte Digges Moon was not the person you would have looked at and thought: missionary.
She was born in 1840 into a wealthy Virginia family with a 1,500-acre tobacco plantation, fine furniture, good books, and every advantage that antebellum Southern society could offer. She was brilliant – one of the first women in the American South to earn a master’s degree. She spoke multiple languages. She was charming, witty, and completely at home in the drawing rooms of Virginia society.
And she was not even a Christian for the first part of her life. She thought the whole thing was rather overdone.
Then in December 1858, at a revival meeting on her college campus, Lottie Moon gave her life to Christ. She was 18 years old. The change was total.
In 1873, at the age of 32, she was appointed by the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board and sailed for China. She had left behind an engagement to a man whose theology she could not share and a teaching career that would have made her comfortable for life. She arrived in Tengchow and began the work of learning a language, entering a culture, and trying to reach people who did not want to be reached.
She moved to the interior city of Pingtu in 1885 and noticed that the local children were terrified of her. So she started baking cookies and leaving them outside her door. The children came for the cookies. Their mothers followed the children. Lottie invited the mothers in and told them about Jesus. Hundreds came to faith. She planted churches. She learned the dialect. She wore Chinese dress.
And she wrote letters home.
Her 1887 letter to Southern Baptist women pleading for more support and more missionaries sparked the creation of a Christmas offering. The first collection in 1888 raised $3,315. Today the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering is the largest missions offering in the world, raising over $150 million every year and supporting thousands of missionaries in over 100 countries.
Then in 1911, the Qing Dynasty fell, and famine swept Shandong province. Lottie pleaded for relief funds. None came. So she started giving away her own food. Her colleagues found her giving away her own meals. By the time her doctor finally ordered her home, Lottie Moon weighed 50 pounds.
A missionary nurse helped her board a ship in Shanghai on December 20, 1912. Lottie was barely conscious. On Christmas Eve 1912, as the ship lay at harbor in Kobe, Japan, she died. She never reached America.
She was 72 years old.
She stood 4 feet 3 inches tall, and she gave the last ounce of herself for a people an ocean away. She changed the world from the inside out, and the offering that bears her name is still doing it.