Little Woman, Long Shadow

Little Woman, Long Shadow

She stood just four feet three inches tall.

TWO WEEKS before Christmas, on December 12, 1840, a baby girl was born into an aristocratic plantation family in Albemarle County, Virginia. Her name was Charlotte Diggs Moon, but everyone called her “Lottie.” She grew to just four feet three inches, yet her intellect and force of personality were enormous. In a day when embroidery and dancing distinguished most young ladies, Lottie spoke six languages fluently and earned a master’s degree in education from the Albemarle Female Institution in 1861, making her the most educated woman in the South. Lottie’s older sister became the first female physician in the state.

Lottie came from a family of dedicated Southern Baptists and attended church most of her life. But at seventeen, Lottie was a staunch skeptic. Faith seemed antithetical to intellect, and Lottie had no need of it.

In December 1858 Dr. John Broadus, later to be one of the first four professors at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, was holding evangelistic meetings for students at his Charlottesville Baptist Church. Lottie went to one of the services, intending to scoff.

That night after she went to bed, a barking dog kept Lottie awake. She was in the habit of using otherwise wasted hours to consider various intellectual propositions. That night she decided to ponder the merits of Christianity. As she lay in the dark, Lottie mentally reviewed Dr. Broadus’s sermon, adding to it the Bible texts and arguments she’d heard throughout her life. By the time she got to the evangelist’s altar call, the Spirit of God prompted her to respond, and Lottie Moon, the brilliant skeptic, believed. When she finished her prayer of commitment to Jesus, she realized that the dog had stopped barking.

At age thirty-three, Lottie was working as a teacher when she heard a call to missions “as clear as a bell.” In July 1873 the foreign mission board of the Southern Baptist Convention appointed her its first unmarried woman missionary to China.

Lottie arrived in Shantung (now Shandong) Province that year and settled in the city of Tengchow (now Qingdao), where she opened a school for girls. Over time the focus of her ministry became personal evangelism among the poor. She wrote to her supporters: “I have never gotten so near the people in my life. . . . I have never had so many opportunities to press home upon their consciences their duty to God and the claims of the Savior to their love and devotion. I feel more and more that this is the work of God.”

Through such letters, Lottie tirelessly advocated for the needs of the people in China. In 1888 she persuaded the women of the Southern Baptist Convention to take an annual missions offering on Christmas Eve. But by 1912, despite such gifts, thousands of people were dying of starvation every day in famine-ravaged Shantung Province. Lottie’s cupboard was always open to the poor, even when she herself had to go without food.

On Christmas Eve that year, as Southern Baptist women collected their special missions offering, many were looking forward to meeting the woman who inspired their gifts. At seventy-two, Lottie Moon was coming home. But that same night, aboard a ship off Japan, she died—of complications from starvation. A few months before she had written, “If I had a thousand lives, I would give them all for the women of China.”

Lottie Moon walked with God for fifty-four years and with the people of China for thirty-nine. She helped pioneer the role of unmarried women missionaries in evangelism and planted more than thirty Chinese churches. The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering continued after her death, and by 1995 it had raised over $$15 billion dollars for missions.

Reflection

So often we judge people by their appearance. In the four-foot-three-inch Lottie Moon there was one of the great intellects of her time and, even more important, a heart completely dedicated to her Lord and to the people she served. Can you think of people that you have unfairly prejudged because of their appearance?

The trouble with you is that you make your decisions on the basis of appearance. You must recognize that we belong to Christ.

2 Corinthians 10:7