July 7, 2026 | Moments Almanac | Doors

Welcome to Scattered Moments. Today is July the 7th, 2026, and on this day, we have three doors. One calendar date. In 1873, a four foot three inch school teacher from Virginia walked through one of them. Her name was Lottie Moon, and on this day, the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board officially appointed her a missionary to China. She was 32 years old, already fluent in five languages, and by every reasonable measure had a comfortable life waiting for her back home. She left anyway. Moon would spend the next thirty nine years in Shandong province, teaching, evangelizing, and eventually starving herself to feed famine victims in her care. She wasn't born a saint. Her early years reveal a woman who arrived in China with more condescension than compassion, describing the people she had come to serve in the casual prejudices of her era. Grace worked on her slowly, the way it works on most of us. Over the years the woman who once looked down on China came to love it so deeply that she gave everything she had, including her own life for its people. It is almost as though she spent the rest of her years living the words Christians would sing Send the light, the blessed gospel light, let it shine from shore to shore. She walked through a door that carried light instead of herself. Sixty four years later, on that same calendar date, a very different door opened in China. This one was forced. On this night of july seventh, nineteen thirty seven, Japanese troops conducting maneuvers near Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing claimed one of their soldiers had gone missing. They demanded entry into the walled town of Wamping to search for him. The soldier, it turned out, had never truly disappeared. He had simply become separated from his unit and found his way back, but before anyone could sort that out, shots were fired. Those shots became the opening battle of the Second Sino Japanese War, a conflict that would claim millions of lives. Historians still debate who fired the first shot and whether the incident was engineered. What no one disputes is the fact that the door was kicked open by force instead of opened in love. And then seven years later, july seventh, nineteen forty four, a third door quietly closed. George W. Truett, pastor of First Baptist Church Dallas, died after nearly forty seven years in one pulpit. He had preached to cowboys in the Davis Mountains, to Allied soldiers during the First World War, and from the steps of the United States Capitol on religious liberty. He never chased influence. He simply opened the door of the gospel to whoever came, year after year, decade after decade, until the Lord finally called him home. Three doors, one walked through sacrificial love, one battered open in violence, and one held open faithfully for others. As Jesus once said, Enter the straight gate, because straight is the gate, and narrow is the way that leads to life, and very few find it. Every day presents us with a doorway, a decision, a sacrifice, a conversation, an opportunity to serve. Some doors promise power, some promise comfort. The narrow door rarely promises either. It always leads to life, so today let's walk through it together. And as we do, let's keep sending the light. That's today's scattered moments. I hope you'll join me tomorrow. Until then, take care. Notice the scattered moments and share the grace.