The "Why" Matters

Every now and then I’ll drive up to the north parking lot at Cedar Springs Baptist Church and just sit there for a few minutes. From up there you can look straight down Main Street. And if you get there early enough it's quiet most of the time. A few cars move through and sometimes you may see a person or two pass along.

And I’ll catch myself wondering what that same view looked like a hundred years ago, or seventy, or even fifty years ago, which isn’t all that long ago when you think about it. There are still plenty of people here who remember it.

I try to picture how folks interacted back then. What the storefronts looked like. How quickly or slowly news traveled. Who was sitting in which office when certain decisions were made. It’s easy to look at a building or even just the layout of town today and assume it simply landed there. But at some point someone had to decide something. Almost certainly someone had to say, "yes," and someone had to say "no."

Sometimes I’ll go from that parking lot back to my desk at the museum and start flipping through old editions of The Post or The Clipper, or even The Weekly Journal. Remember that one from the early '90's? You can learn a lot that way. You start to see the conversations as they were happening. Not as we remember them now, but as the names and dates, and real-life discussions or debates that were taking place. And what I've realized is that what feels settled today once felt uncertain.

That’s where the “why” starts to come into focus.

A building went up because there was growth, or perhaps it's construction was denied because it wasn't suitable. An ordinance was passed to enhance this or discourage that. The reasoning is usually there if you’re willing to look for it. It may not always hold up the same way decades later, but it almost always existed.

When one can understand the “why,” especially with something that may feel distasteful or unwanted, the natural urge to assume ill-intent makes less of an immediate case for itself. We stop seeing things as random or careless and start to see the chain of decisions that led there.

And once we see that chain, it becomes a little easier to think about what comes next. Not because history hands us the answer, but because it reminds us that every generation stands where it does for a reason. And perhaps every generation stood where we stand now, having to make decisions.

From that church parking lot, Main Street looks established. But underneath it are layers of choices made by people who were doing the best they could with what they had and what they knew at the time. That's not to say every decision was a good one. In fact, some good decisions are made out of learning from previous bad decisions.

Knowing all this doesn’t settle every question we face now, and it doesn't necessarily justify every decision made before us. It just keeps us from assuming this moment appeared out of nowhere and gives a more clear vision of how to decide for the future.

The “why” doesn’t always change our opinion, but it usually deepens our understanding.

And that’s just enough to make the "why" matter.