Who is Lottie Moon?

Every year at Christmas time, we start talking about giving to the annual Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Missions ....I hear that year after year, and I knew that we were giving to missions,,,,,thats all I knew! So this year I decided to read about this person: Lottie Moon and I am so glad I did! She lived a LONG time ago; 1840-1912. You can go to Wikipedia and read more about her. Here on my blog I will just write about some of the interesting facts about her!

**She spent nearly 40 years helping the Chinese

**She grew up to her full height of 4 feet 3 inches

**Moon received one of the first Master of Arts degrees awarded to a woman by a southern institution.

**She spoke numerous languages: Latin, Greek, French, Italian and Spanish. She was also fluent in reading Hebrew. Later, she would become expert at Chinese.

**Throughout her missionary career, Moon faced plague, famine, revolution, and war.

** 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 fifty pounds.

**Raised in a family “of culture and means,” Lottie at first thought of the Chinese as an inferior people, and insisted on wearing American clothes to maintain a degree of distance from the “heathen” people. But gradually she came to realize that the more she shed her westernized trappings and identified with the Chinese people, the more their simple curiosity about foreigners (and sometimes rejection) turned into genuine interest in the Gospel. She began wearing Chinese clothes, adopted Chinese customs, learned to be sensitive to Chinese culture, and came to respect and admire Chinese culture and learning. In turn she gained love and respect from many Chinese people.

**The annual Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Missions has raised a total of $1.5 billion for missions since 1888, and finances half the entire Southern Baptist missions budget every year.

**Lottie Moon was a VERY SPECIALChristian LADY! Because of her, hundreds of people were saved! She encouraged Southern Baptist women to organize mission societies to support Missionaries. She encouraged the ladies to step out and become missionaries themselves!

Lottie Moon has come to personify the missionary spirit for Southern Baptists and many other Christians, as well.