Just now is the height of the Southern Baptists’ annual Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, and today is the anniversary of her birth in 1840. A missionary to China, she is routinely described as “the nearest thing Protestants have to a saint.”
Famously, she broke off her engagement to the scholar Crawford Toy because he doubted the literal truth of Genesis, and she has ever since been held up as the exemplar toward which all believers should strive. Budding pastors are encouraged to cite her example to their congregations, to steer, and be steered, by it.
Almost never do they remark that acute loneliness was the central theme of her life, a constant refrain in her letters home.
Loneliness became her great enemy. “I am bored to death with living alone,” she wrote Tupper. “I don’t find my own society either agreeable or edifying.”
Nor is it often remarked that she was recalled from China because she had gone insane, or that she died in transit aboard a ship in a Japanese harbor, alone and thousands of miles from home.
That’s the life pastors are trained to urge upon others. It stinks.
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