Lottie Moon served as a missionary in China for nearly 40 years. Her letters home kept begging for more workers and more support, and in 1888 Southern Baptist women started a Christmas offering for foreign missions. It began at about $3,000 and grew to more than $82 million by 1993, and it was later named for her. Near the end of her life a terrible famine struck the people she served. She gave them all she had. She wrote, “I hope no missionary will be as lonely as I have been.” Literally starving, she grew weaker and weaker. A nurse started home with her, but Lottie died on Christmas Eve, 1912, aboard ship in the harbor at Kobe, Japan.
Ramabai was born in India in 1858. Girls had no schools, but her parents taught her Sanskrit. During the great famine of 1876 to 1878, both of her parents starved to death. She became so respected as a teacher that she was given the title Pandita, meaning wise teacher. Later her husband died, leaving her an orphan, a widow, and a single mother. In England she came to faith in Christ. In 1889 she founded the Mukti Mission for orphans, widows, and single mothers. In 1896, during another severe famine, she led a caravan of ox carts that rescued thousands of girls and widows. She learned Hebrew and Greek to translate the Bible for poor women, and she died in 1922 just as she finished.
Twice a week for more than 30 years, Albert Lexie rose before dawn and rode buses for an hour and a half from Monessen to Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. There he pushed his purple cart through the halls and shined the shoes of doctors, executives, and staff for two to five dollars a pair. From 1982 to 2013 he quietly gave his tips to the hospital’s Free Care Fund, which helps families who cannot afford their children’s care. By the time he retired, his gifts had added up to $202,000. He called the patients Albert’s kids. He died in 2018 at 76. Small, faithful gifts given over many years can add up to something extraordinary.
In the early 1920s, doctors knew diabetes was linked to a missing substance from the pancreas, but every attempt to extract it had failed. Frederick Banting, a young Canadian doctor, read a medical article by Moses Baron about what happens when the pancreatic duct is tied off. It gave him an idea for how to get the substance out before it was destroyed. Determined to test it, he talked it over with several people, and Professor J.J.R. Macleod at the University of Toronto gave him facilities to work. With a medical student named Charles Best as his assistant, Banting began the work that led to the discovery of insulin. Millions of lives followed from one man who read carefully and would not let a good idea go.
In 1854 most people believed cholera spread through bad air. Dr. John Snow held the unpopular view that it spread through water. When cholera broke out again in London at the end of August 1854, Snow suspected the Broad Street pump. He did not just guess. He went through the death records and talked with the families of the dead, and he found that most of the victims had lived near that pump and drunk its water. He took his findings to the community leaders, and on September 8, 1854, the pump handle was removed. The new deaths stopped. Snow was willing to go door to door and to stand by an unpopular truth. Truth spoken with care and courage can save lives.
