Early on in this Lighthouse Ride business I had intended to raise only enough money to fix the schools I was immediately responsible for, the 29 grade schools of the Toledo District. When I told Celia Usher, General Manager of Catholic Schools, my intentions, she retorted, “That’s great, Matt. What about the rest of us?” That question cut me to the quick…and maybe, just maybe I had an inkling of what Jesus felt in his interaction with a very clever pagan woman.
Early on in his ministry, Jesus made it clear that he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But in the one single argument in Scripture wherein Jesus is bested, a Syro-Phoenician woman challenged this view by commenting, even dogs get the scraps that fall from the table of their masters. In short she was saying, “That’s great! You’re gonna save the Jewish people. What about the rest of us?” Theologians view this story as the turning point in Jesus’s self-understanding, his realization that he had come to save not just the Jewish people, but all of humankind.
So in Celia’s challenge I realized I had to expand my labors from the Toledo District to all six districts of Belize; from my 29 schools to all 127 schools. That is when my daunting task became the impossible task. But what can you do when someone plaintively asks, “What about the rest of us?” Jesus responded by expanding his mission to include all of humankind; I pray we save not just the schools of Toledo, but all Catholic Primary Education in Belize.
What About the Rest of Us?
