A Story Worth telling of a Christian Missionary who gave her all - Miss Lottie Moon (shared by Stuart Lawrence):
In the winter of 1912, the people of one Chinese town began whispering about an elderly American woman who seemed incapable of saying no. Every night there was another knock at her door. Every morning someone else walked away carrying food that should have kept her alive.
The rumors spread almost as quickly as the famine. Some said she had hidden stores of grain. Others believed money was still arriving from America. Neither was true.
Lottie Moon had lived in China since 1873, long enough to trade her Western dresses for Chinese clothing, speak the local language, and know families by name. When revolution toppled the Qing dynasty in 1911, railways collapsed, harvests failed, banks closed, and food vanished almost overnight. The mission board urged her to leave. She quietly folded the evacuation letter and stayed.
At first she spent every dollar she had, paying outrageous prices to buy grain from hoarders before distributing it to hungry neighbors. Then the grain disappeared. Beans disappeared. Even tree bark was stripped from the countryside as desperate families searched for anything they could eat.
The knocks on her door never stopped.
By then her pantry had become the last dependable source of food on the street. Cups of rice, handfuls of flour, jars of salted vegetables—everything went to someone else. When there was only enough left for one person, Lottie made a decision almost impossible to imagine. She simply stopped eating.
She insisted she wasn't hungry. She survived on hot water while watching the people around her survive on the meals she surrendered. Her letters home became increasingly desperate, demanding aid that never arrived quickly enough.
When a doctor finally forced his way inside her freezing home in December, he found the 72-year-old missionary barely alive. She weighed only about fifty pounds and no longer recognized the people standing beside her bed. Neighbors carried her to a waiting boat on a stretcher, wrapped in blankets, knowing they were saying goodbye to the woman who had quietly kept them alive.
Lottie Moon died weeks later, but her story didn't end there. The Christmas offering later established in her name has since raised more than a billion dollars for humanitarian and missionary work around the world.
