Winter and Cinnamon Rolls
It’s the weekend of Valentine’s, and I haven’t left the house since Friday night. Saturday was a wintery mess of ice and freezing rain from morning till night.
The cold weather and lingering snow on the ground makes me want to bake. And even though I think Valentine’s Day is a silly, commercialized Hallmark holiday, it’s still nice to have something warm and sweet to enjoy on a Sunday morning with coffee.
My dad’s famous cinnamon rolls came to mind.
There was a period of several years when I was in college when my dad made cinnamon rolls basically all the time. Or at least, it felt like he was always proofing dough overnight and getting up early to roll it out, sprinkle it with cinnamon sugar, and then bake the swirly buns just in time for the rest of us to rise and eat one, or maybe two.
The recipe isn’t anything fancy or special. He got it off the back of a standard flour bag. But he got really good at dough and I don’t think I’ve ever tasted a cinnamon roll as good as his. Not too sweet, but with plenty of cinnamon. And in the Cate household, you keep the icing separate and only drizzle it onto your single bun when it’s warm and ready to eat.
I was supposed to sing at church on Sunday morning (cancelled because of the ice) and I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to bring cinnamon rolls for the band, on a special Sunday, even if it is a dumb holiday?
I asked my mom if we still had the recipe. She said yes and got it out for me a little while later. When I finished a chapter of the weekend novel I was reading, I went into the kitchen to take a look. The ingredient “yeast” stood out to me. I checked the fridge, and sure enough, there was a packet of yeast inside a Ziplock bag. It hasn’t been used since my dad last baked something, which would have been probably over 15 months ago.
I took the yeast out and read some of the print on the packaging. I looked at the recipe again. Mom said something about checking to make sure the yeast would still work. Not sure exactly what that means.
I felt overwhelmed. I’ve never made bread. I’ve never made these cinnamon rolls. I’ve never used yeast and wouldn’t know where to start.
I started to cry. Grief and regret, longing and a feeling of injustice—all rose up in me at once.
I wished I had asked my dad to teach me to make his cinnamon rolls while he was still here. I wish he was still here to teach me. I wish I didn’t have to do so many things alone and without his guiding hand.
“If you were in New York,” mom said, “and were trying to make these, you would be calling daddy on the phone asking for help.”
Wordlessly I nodded, tears dripping off my face. Finally, wails escaped my mouth as I went to collapse on the couch.
Mom came and sat next to me, rubbing my back, while I cried it out.
In these moments of intense grief, when it hits me that my dad is truly gone and I won’t see him for the rest of my life, I wish that I was old.
I wish to be old and dying, close to the end. I already feel like a 50-year-old in a 27-year-old’s body.
In these moments, the years stretching ahead of me, barring an accident or a disease that takes me young, are years that I’m not looking forward to living. The possibility that they could hold joy seems closed off to me. As Mark Talbot writes of both Ruth and Job, when they suffered, they doubted if their lives would ever be pleasant again: sometimes “what is happening to us seems so bad that we think there is no hope that our lives can ever be good again” (When the Stars Disappear, Crossway 2020, p. 28).
As I cried on the couch and my mom offered me her presence to comfort me, I looked out of the window panes of our front door to the dreary wintery day. It wasn’t beautiful, just wet and cold and dead. The snow that occasionally visits us in Maryland can make winter prettier to look at, but it’s only distracting us from the fact that the world outside is asleep and dead. The season drags on longer than I’d like, almost too long to endure.
The winter outside reflects the winter in my heart. Things in my heart—love, joy, hope, peace, dreams—are dead. Or perhaps dormant, which only time will reveal. Even as recently as two weeks ago, my hopes rose—for certain dreams and desires to soon be fulfilled—only to be quickly dashed, pulled out of my reach, plunging me into several days of dark thoughts that I had no power to free myself from.
I have a feeling that, though spring outside will certainly come, just when we feel we can’t take it anymore, it will still be winter in my heart. A time will come when the seasons don’t reflect my inner state. The world moves on but my own life will very likely continue to stand still. “In a holding pattern,” I’ve taken to saying lately.
I don’t think winter will continue only because I doubt the Lord’s goodness toward me (which I do, and which, as Dr. Talbot so kindly assures me in his book, is a normal feeling after experiencing profound suffering and personal calamity). But I believe my winter may be a longer season than I originally expected because the seeds planted in my sorrow and pain need an extraordinarily long time to germinate.
It’s already been over a year since my life path was irrevocably diverted by a permanent roadblock. Yet nothing has changed; answers and direction continue to elude me. I’m squinting to see the letters on the signs ahead, but they’re still too blurred to make any real sense of them or where I’m going.
I suppose one of the blessings of winter is that, for farmers, it’s a time of rest. There’s little to no plant, growing and harvesting, raising and slaughtering. There’s stores for the winter in the cellar, and there’s less daylight. Winter is a time for a little planning, but mostly resting and hibernating.
In my own personal winter, even as it drags on longer than I want, I continue to have time to rest. I sleep, a lot, and I read. I have time to read books like Talbot’s. I have time think and cry and let God do his work on those seeds he planted in my pain. I want so badly for a Spring season: for new life to come into my heart and into my days. I feel some sympathy for a barren woman who so longs to feel life stirring in her womb. No matter how hard I try, I can’t rush the process, can’t force the flowers and fruit to grow before they’re ready.
In his book Gentle and Lowly, Dane Ortlund writes about how Jesus tends to his hurting sinners and sufferers: “Our trouble is that we do not take the Scripture seriously when it speaks of us as Christ’s body. Christ is the head; we are his own body parts… How do we care for a wounded body part? We nurse it, bandage it, protect it, give it time to heal… So with Christ and believers. We are part of him” (Gentle and Lowly, Crossway 2020, 41).
As I read that, I wondered, is that what my Jesus is doing with me? I keep thinking I’m ready, like the kid with the wrapped sprained ankle saying, “Put me in coach! I can do it!” And Jesus shows me again and again that I’m not ready. He doesn’t do this to withhold for the sake of withholding. I believe that much. He does this because my heartbreak was so great. My wound is still bleeding, badly. He knows I’m not ready, and I still need time. He’s the only one who can heal the wound, even though I keep thinking and acting like comforts of the world will make it better.
I know I’ve used many metaphors thus far to describe my current state: an unending winter, a long dark road with blurry and confusing signage, a wound that seems to be healed only to break open again and again.
Maybe it will help you understand how death and suffering is affecting me, or how it is affecting someone else you know. Maybe it will help you see why platitudes aren’t always reassuring, and why someone can still believe in God while struggling with ongoing pain and stress. Maybe it puts words to your own struggle. Maybe you can relate. I want you to know you’re not alone.
I still want to learn to make cinnamon rolls and make my daddy proud. But it wasn’t happening this weekend. Instead, mom suggested we make his famous chocolate cake, the most moist and sumptuous chocolate cake you will ever taste. We could even make a few as cupcakes and take them to the band in the morning, mom said.
We prepped a cup of instant coffee and pulled out the falling-apart mid-80’s Chocolatier magazine with the “Hershey’s Black Magic Cake” recipe. We substituted melted butter for vegetable oil because who uses that bad-for-you stuff anymore anyways? And oh, were those cupcakes perfect. (I’m getting really good at guesstimating how many more minutes a cake or cupcake needs for the center to become firm.) They’re so tasty that putting icing on them would actually ruin them. The only thing that would make them better is a scoop of vanilla icing to soak into the spongey cake.
They aren’t cinnamon rolls, but they’re from scratch and it’s our decades-old recipe and daddy would be proud.