You may have misunderstood the title, but read on.
I spent some time in the church library today to do some "leisurely" reading. Flipping through the pages of a book on missions, I came across a name I have heard and read about a thousand times over when I was growing up. Each Christmas season, the Southern Baptist denomination collects from their churches what has been dubbed "The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Foreign Missions." In 2007, the denomination received $150,409,653.86 to support Southern Baptist mission work outside of the US! Incidentally, there is also "The Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for Home Missions" to support mission work within North America (last year they received $60 million).
Anyway...
Lottie Moon is considered the "patron saint" of Southern Baptist foreign missions for her efforts and devoting her entire life in winning the Chinese people to Jesus Christ.
Born in 1840 as Charlotte Digges Moon to affluent parents who were staunch Baptists, Anna Maria Barclay and Edward Harris Moon. She grew up on the family's ancestral fifteen-hundred-acre tobacco plantation in Virginia.
Lottie went to school at the Baptist-affiliated Albemarle Female Institute in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1861 Moon received one of the first Master of Arts degrees awarded to a woman by a southern institution. She sang gloriously, played the piano forte and spoke numerous languages: Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish (those alone make me want to marry her brain!). She was also fluent in reading Hebrew. Later, an expert at Chinese communications.
A spirited and outspoken girl, Lottie was indifferent to her Christian upbringing until her late teens. But she underwent a spiritual awakening at the age of 18, after a series of revival meetings on the college campus. To the landed-family's surprise, Lottie's younger sister Edmonia accepted a call to go to North China as a missionary in 1872. Lottie herself soon felt called by God to serve with her her sister. On July 7, 1873, she was officially appointed as a missionary to China. She was 33 years old.
While on furlough, she came across Crawford Howell Toy whom she first encountered at the Albemarle Female Institute while she was a student. Lottie was a capable student in Hebrew and English grammar under Toy's tutelage. Toy wrote of Moon, "She writes the best English I have ever been privileged to read."
Crawford Toy and Lottie Moon fell in love. Crawford Toy was also appointed a missionary to the Orient, but the Civil War prevented his going. He stayed and taught at the Southern Baptist Seminary. After some time, Lottie Moon returned from China to America to marry him.
But in his studies, he was influenced by European higher criticism of the Bible. Toy began intellectual pursuits that would ultimately cost him his tenure at the Southern Seminary, later moving to Harvard. Toy saw Darwin's theories as truth revealed by God "in the form proper to his time." His theology began to be shaped by Julius Wellhausen. Toy ceased to believe that the Bible is the Word of God but a mere piece of ancient literature. He believed that none of the miracles in the Bible are true; that Jesus is not God; Christ is no different from all the other religious leaders who seek the truth.
In Lottie's 1881 correspondence with Baptist Missions Director, H. A. Tupper, Moon expressed her plans to marry Toy, who was now a professor at Harvard. Upon her return, she discovered Toy's new set of beliefs that were so contrary to hers. Ultimately, Toy and Moon's relationship was broken before their marriage plans were realized. Moon cited religious reasons for calling off the wedding, in addition to his decision to not become a missionary anymore.
Lottie Moon was shattered and grief-stricken by the new theology and liberal beliefs of the man she so deeply admired and so beautifully loved. She returned to China heartbroken, never to return to home in America, never to marry, and lonely in soul, yet joyfully poured her very life into a ministry for the Chinese people.
At the height of internal conflicts in China (The Sino-Japanese War 1894; the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and the Chinese Nationalist uprising against the Qing Dynasty in 1911) salaries were voluntarily cut. Moon shared her personal finances and food with anyone in need around her, severely affecting both her physical and mental health. In 1912, she only weighed 50 pounds and was arranged to be sent back home to the United States. However, Moon died en route, at the age of 72, on Christmas Eve 1912 (thus the Christmas Offering), in the harbor of Kobe, Japan. Her body was cremated and the remains returned to her family in Virginia, for burial.
She gave up her love for her beliefs, she gave so much love because of it.
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