4.2 4.3 mission field  (Page 6/9)

O! that God would use me in bringing the lost ones to the Light. . .Lord, let this be my life work, if thou would'st only give me work in thy vineyard school-teaching would be a thing of the past. ^{Ibid., September 12, 1898. (Underlining hers.)}

I feel that to do work for the Lord is the greatest calling under the sun. I am happier in that work than anything else; there is no work that I now see by which I could make a living and I know of nothing except teaching school. I know that I could do some good teaching school, but nothing like as much as [I] would like. I am looking to the Lord to direct me. ^{Ibid., October, 1898.}

After teaching three years she followed her desire for a more direct religious vocation by enrolling in the Baptist Missionary Training School in Chicago, there being no such facility for women among Southern Baptists. Predictably, she reached a period of "agonized waiting upon the Lord" Singleton, p. 2. at a summer youth encampment in 1903 and gave herself to the only strictly religious calling and vocation open to one of her sex: missionary work. While the decision brought release and peace temporarily, she discovered that it did not end her spiritual quest.

Annie sailed for China in 1905 at age twenty-eight; her mission was to assist in establishing a Baptist center in the interior province of Honan. There she faced dilemmas common to missionaries: in China, a long period of language study prior to any undertaking; loneliness and homesickness; and the discovery that sin or imperfection haunted even those who feel they have given everything. She wrote remorsefully on the final day of 1905,

. . .even now, since I've been here I am not near the Lord all the time as I would like to be. I am so sinful—oh that my heart might be pure. . . . Sallee, December 31, 1905.

Well,

I must be conceited to feel they all need me so, but I am sure there is no place on earth I'd rather be and there is no place on earth, so far as I know where my life counts for so much as at home.
I am not a bit discontented about being here. I know this is God's place for me, not my choosing, but His. I was willing to follow, hence I think it wrong for me to be sad about it when He is leading. I am happy to be here, but I am still human and very much so.

Another issue—not common to all missionaries, but an important decision for women in her position—presented itself to Annie in China. Eugene Sallee, a member of the Honan Baptist mission group, asked her to marry him. As a younger woman she had had several suitors and imagined that she would someday marry, but her acceptance of the missionary challenge was based on serving as a single person. Although missionary wives like Anne Bagby were able to exercise a ministerial role unlike laywomen or pastors' wives in America, they were generally not as active, independent, or visible as unmarried female missionaries. Wives were clearly part of a team, but the husband was the spokesman and primary missionary appointee. For example, when Laura Barton, a Texas missionary to China for five years, married Z. C. Taylor, a widower serving in Brazil, it was assumed she would move to Brazil rather than vice versa.

Carroll, p. 730 reads:

. . .the bride [Miss Barton], of course, giving up her work in China.