Wendell Cutting
lived life for others
By Nancy
Slaff
The Alpine Sun
I am
standing upon a seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white
sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is
an object of beauty and strength and I stand and watch her until
at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea
and sky come to mingle with each other.
Then someone at my side says, "There! She’s gone!" Gone
from my sight, that is all. She is just as large in mast and hull
and spar as she was when she left my side, and she is just as able
to bear her load of living weight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her, and just at
the moment when someone at my side says, "There, she’s gone!"
there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready
to take up the glad shout – "There she comes!" and that is…dying —
Anonymous
So in touch with the present and our three dimensional
world, most humans don’t reflect on what is happening "elsewhere."
They see only the presence of the moment. Certainly to many, if
not most, death is a finality. The shell of the person disappears
from their sight as they continue to deal with the hustle and
bustle of daily events and people. To others, dying is more than
an event. It is, simply put…they are leaving here, to go…there.
Nothing really changes. What accomplishments they made
while…here…grows incrementally as one person takes the torch and
passes it on to others, who pass it on to still others.
Today, Thursday July 6, 2006, Wendell R. Cutting is
memorialized for living his life for others, and for what he left
behind. To most people, his many accomplishments will remain a
memory, a name, while to others who knew him have the memory of
one man’s heart, a behavior to exemplify; a solid ship in stormy
seas.
The football field at El Capitan High School in
Lakeside that now bears his name will be, to future athletic youth
and observers, a playing field with his name on it.
The clinic in Honduras will become to the jungle
residents a place for healing, love and shelter, and maybe an
occasional miracle. In time, it will be the place for hope,
bearing the name of a foreigner, but good works will grow
incrementally as others take up his cloak.
For some time, those who knew him will whisper of a
generosity that knew no bounds or borders.
Others will continue in Wendell’s footsteps to assure his vision
is not lost in that Mosquito Coast. It was not Malaria, Dengue
Fever, or poisonous snakebite that finally felled this great man,
nor was it the alligator-infested rivers upon which he trusted a
not-so-fancy watercraft. It wasn’t an earthquake in El Salvador or
a tsunami in Thailand that brought him down. It wasn’t gunfire
from angry Taliban or Al Queda in Iraq, as he worked to build a
women’s learning center in Afghanistan. Indeed not, for he was
fearless, as he moved through these places, putting his personal
world in God’s hands.
In 1972, Wendell became the mayor of San Jacinto
California — at age 23, making him one of the youngest mayors in
the United States. If that wasn’t enough, he worked as a
schoolteacher and then assistant principal in the late 70s at a
middle school in San Jacinto. By 1990, he was ready to take the
responsibility as chief of staff for Congressman Duncan Hunter,
braving both happy and unhappy American citizens.
Yet everywhere he went, he gained friends. In fact, his
friends became his family — and folks became family after they
shook his hand, but once. But now, he disappears from our view, to
become, in time, just a name on a clinic and football field, a
room in a Boy’s and Girls Club, a learning center for women, lives
saved in nations all over the world; and people who will take time
out of their lives to accomplish some goodness he inspired.
It is those personal goals that are the catalysts to
move his ship — a ship of good works and love. And even though we
can’t see Wendell’s ship anymore, it is still afloat.
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