As delighted as Lottie was at seeing her old friend Martha again, she was even more delighted when news reached her that Robert Willingham would be coming to China to see firsthand the work of the missionaries there. This was the first time ever that a secretary of the Foreign Mission Board was going to see for himself what it was like to be a missionary in China. Lottie believed that if Robert Willingham saw the opportunities that existed for spreading the gospel, he would go home and stir up American congregations to become more involved.
Robert Willingham experienced even more of the missionary life than he had intended. Just as he arrived, there was an outbreak of meningitis in Tengchow, followed swiftly by bubonic plague. After his visit, he went home with a fresh appreciation of the conditions under which Lottie and the other missionaries in China lived. But, of course, by now such conditions seemed normal to Lottie, who had been a missionary in China for thirty-four years.
Chapter 15
Do You Smell Smoke?
Robert Willingham returned home and stirred up American congregations. During the following year, 1908, more missionary recruits came to join the work in China. Much to her delight, Lottie discovered she was the inspiration for many of these new missionaries who had decided to come to China. Dr. James Gaston and his wife were the first of the new recruits to arrive. James Gaston had not even been a Southern Baptist when he first heard about Lottie Moon and her work in China. He had been so impressed with what she was doing that he had joined the Southern Baptist church and began to pray regularly for Lottie. That had been ten years before, and now he was in Tengchow ready to learn Mandarin and all about Chinese culture from the veteran missionary herself.
By now Lottie knew exactly how to ease a new missionary into the culture. She had outfitted one of the rooms at the Little Crossroads as a Western-style guest room, complete with wrought-iron bed and side tables. Lottie did not need these home comforts herself, but she knew from her own and Edmonia’s experience thirty-five years before that a missionary needed to be gently guided into the pattern of life in China to reduce the effects of culture shock. As soon as Lottie felt that the Gastons had adjusted to their new environment, she sent them to Laichowfu, where they were assigned to open another Baptist hospital.
Soon after the Gastons left, another missionary, Wayne Adams, took up residence in Lottie’s guest room. Wayne was fresh out of seminary, where he had heard numerous stories—and a few tall tales—about Lottie Moon. He had turned down a comfortable pastorate in America to come to China. Wayne also had a fiancée, Floy White, who was finishing her studies in the United States before joining him in China. Lottie decided that Wayne would make a fine missionary and set about teaching him.
A few weeks after his arrival, Wayne was sitting and talking with Lottie over dinner. Very few Chinese people knew much about the rest of the world. Indeed, many Chinese scholars still believed the earth was flat. As a result, Lottie enjoyed having an American guest to discuss world events with. As they talked, Wayne suddenly jumped out of his chair. “Do you smell smoke?” he asked.
Lottie put her nose in the air. Because there was rarely a chimney in a Chinese home, there was always the faint, lingering smell of smoke around. But this time it was different. “I believe I do,” Lottie said, thinking quickly. “Check outside, Wayne, and I’ll look in the kitchen.”
Lottie had only reached the doorway when she heard Wayne yelling. “It’s the house next door! Get out!”
Lifting the hem of her skirt so as not to trip on it, Lottie rushed from the house. Wayne was right. Huge flames were shooting out of the empty house next door.
Other neighbors quickly began to gather, not to help but to curse. “See, the old devil woman’s house is going to burn down,” one woman crooned to her toddler. “The gods have had enough of her evil ways.”
“Finally you are getting what you have deserved!” spat another hostile neighbor.
Lottie tried not to take what they were saying to heart, though after living among these people for so long, their continued antagonism still surprised and troubled her. Now was not the time to dwell on that, however; she had to concentrate on saving her house.
“Quickly, Wayne, get the bucket from the back porch and fetch water. Perhaps it’s not too late to stop the flames from reaching my roof,” Lottie yelled.
Wayne ran to get the bucket and then ran to the well. Lottie watched in dismay as the swelling crowd hardly made way for him to get through. “God,” she prayed silently, “bring us help, or my house will be destroyed.”
As she finished her prayer, she heard a yell from down the street. Lottie watched as a contingent of the mandarin’s soldiers came running into view. They carried buckets, and as soon as they reached the Little Crossroads, they formed a human chain to pass the water from the well to the house, where several of them threw the water at the roof.
Soon some of the local Christians joined in, and much to Lottie’s relief, the danger passed. The wind also shifted a little, helping to keep the flames off her house. However, the wind shift now put the house on the other side in danger of burning. The family that lived there rushed around, yelling and begging for help.
“We must help them,” Wayne told the exhausted Christians.
“Yes, we must,” said one of the Christian men as the group manned their buckets again.
A murmur went through the crowd when they saw what was happening. They began to whisper to one another, wondering why these Christians were prepared to help people who despised them.
“Climb that ladder,” Lottie directed one of the men in the crowd, “and Ling will hand you a bucket. Throw the water as far into the flames as you can.”
Soon many of the neighbors had been pressed into service. Christians and non-Christians worked side by side until the fire was out.
When she finally lay down on her k’ang that night, Lottie was exhausted. She could still smell the smoke, and one of the Christian men had offered to stay up all night to make sure the fire did not rekindle. But Lottie was proud, too. Proud that the Christians had accepted the challenge to bless people who often cursed them. She hoped it would lead to a new openness among the people of Tengchow to the gospel.
Despite Lottie’s obvious joy at the influx of new missionaries, two matters weighed heavily on her heart. The first was the death of her sister Edmonia. Eddie had moved to Stark, Florida, where she lived a reclusive life in a tiny clapboard house. She had died a lonely and sad death, and Lottie wished she could have been able to be there at the end to cheer up her little sister. The two of them had been through so much together, pioneering the way for single women missionaries to work in China. Indeed, Lottie doubted she would have even become a missionary if Edmonia had not paved the way for her.
As Lottie looked around at the progress Christianity had made during the thirty-five years since she and Edmonia had worked together in Tengchow, she knew her sister would have been proud. The Southern Baptists now oversaw sixteen churches in North China, along with fifty-six schools teaching over one thousand students. There were forty-two Chinese male evangelists and fourteen female, and over two thousand Christians were baptized church members.
The second matter that weighed heavy on Lottie was the thirty-two thousand dollars the Foreign Mission Board was in debt. The debt had arisen because of the way the board raised the money to meet its budget. At conventions and conferences, missionaries and speakers would get up and stir the listeners with the need for more missionaries and funds to maintain the denomination’s mission projects around the world. The participants at these gatherings were mostly pastors, who were asked to pledge as much money as possible to missions on behalf of their churches. Of course, they usually pledged a lot of money, thinking they could pass on the vision for missions to their congregations, who would in turn donate the pledged amount. However, this was not always the case. Many pastors’ enthusiasm for missions fizzled in light of new church building projects and Sunday school budgets. As a result, the churches were not able to meet their pledges. In the meantime, the Foreign Mission Board went ahead and sent out new missionaries and authorized new projects based upon the assumption that the total amount of money pledged would come in. It never did, and the board was in constant financial crisis, especially around April, when the financial accounts for the year were tallied.
When Lottie read about the debt, which represented the difference between what was pledged and what had been collected, she was saddened. If only people in the United States could see the changed lives and the new hope the missionaries had brought to people in China, Lottie was certain they would eagerly meet their pledges. Lottie felt she had to do what little she could to help the financial situation, so she asked that the small inheritance she received from Edmonia’s estate be sent directly to the Foreign Mission Board for debt reduction.
Despite the financial crisis, three more missionaries were sent to China. One of them was Wayne Adams’s fiancée, Floy White. Lottie was torn. She welcomed the new missionaries with open arms, but she feared there would not be enough money in the budget to keep them all.
With Floy’s arrival, a wedding date was soon set. The wedding was a mixture of Chinese and Western traditions, which Lottie herself organized in great detail. Lottie had become very fond of Wayne during the time he had stayed with her and wanted to give him the best wedding possible. Along with some helpers, Lottie decorated Wayne and Floy’s new house in red, the color of celebration in China. Missionaries came from all over North China to the wedding, and Lottie arranged a delicious wedding feast of roast goose, soup, boiled fish, salad, vegetables, dessert, even candies for them all. After the wedding reception, the couple left in a new sedan chair that Wayne had purchased for his bride.
In 1910, just a few months after the wedding, all the Southern Baptist missionaries and Chinese workers serving in Shantung province met together in Chefoo. Lottie was thrilled to see old friends again, especially those missionaries who had followed Tarleton Crawford but had now chosen to come back under the covering of the Foreign Mission Board. Lottie and some of the older missionaries reminisced about their early days in Shantung province when there were few Chinese converts. Now there were thousands of Christians. Some of the evangelists and teachers attending the gathering were children, even grandchildren, of some of the earliest converts.
One of the women missionaries serving in P’ingtu related a story to Lottie. She had been out visiting a remote village when she came across a very old woman who was singing hymns and reciting passages of Scripture. When the missionary asked the woman where she had learned them, the old woman replied that a missionary had visited twenty years before and given her a Bible and taught her the hymns. The woman had waited patiently for twenty years for another Christian worker to come so that she could be baptized. This and other stories like it touched Lottie deeply. They highlighted some of the successes the missionaries had had over the years, but they also drew attention to the work that still needed to be done. There were still many people who had never heard the gospel, and many more workers were needed.
Another need was growing in China. The crops had failed in Central China, starting a famine that soon began to affect the coastal regions as well. Lottie wrote to everyone she could think of, pleading for money to buy food and clothing for the victims of the famine. She could not get used to seeing people lying in the streets dying from hunger. As a result, she took in as many needy people as she could, and her old cook was constantly boiling millet to feed the crowd that gathered around the Little Crossroads.
