Lottie Moon: The Cookie Lady of China

Lottie Moon was a tiny woman — barely four and a half feet tall — but she had one of the biggest hearts and sharpest minds of her day. She was one of the first women in the American South to earn a full college degree, at a time when most people thought girls did not need one. She could have done anything. She chose to go to China.

When Lottie arrived in her Chinese town, the children were shy of the strange foreign lady and ran away from her. So Lottie thought of a delicious idea. She went into her little kitchen and baked trays of sweet teacakes and cookies, and offered them to the children. Soon the children were not running away at all — they were running toward her, and their mothers came too, and Lottie told them all, over the cookies, how much God loved them.

Lottie lived in China for almost forty years. She learned to dress and speak and cook like the people around her, until she no longer felt like a foreigner at all but like one of them. She loved the Chinese as her own family, and they loved her.

Then a dreadful famine came, and the people all around Lottie began to starve. Lottie could not bear it. She gave away her food. She gave away her money. She gave and gave until there was almost nothing left for herself, growing thinner and weaker because she would not eat while her neighbours had nothing.

By the time others realised how little she had kept for herself, Lottie was very frail. She died in 1912 on board a ship taking her home to rest, having quite literally given everything she had for the people she loved. To this day Christians remember Lottie Moon every Christmas — the small woman with the plate of cookies who spent her whole self on China.