Reflections on Butterhorn Rolls

My sister and I got together this morning to make my Grandma’s butterhorn rolls. I cannot accurately describe them—they can only be experienced. I’ll just say that they are everything you’d expect a Midwestern grandma’s bread to be. Grandma would say that’s because of the secret ingredient—Grandma’s love.

Neither my sister or I had made them before, and it was so fun to chat about family memories as we mixed and proofed and rolled and cooled and punched down and tried to obey her explicit instructions to “bring to a boil, but don’t let boil,” all the while asking each other, “Are we doing this right?”

This special morning has me reflecting on a few things today:

—These butternhorn rolls take a lot of work and a lot of waiting. As I piled four on my plate every Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas (what can I say, I have a long, loving relationship with bread), I don’t think I ever gave a thought to the labor of love it was to create such a feast. She and Gpa must have been up before the sun, just doing their thing, “awaking the dawn” as the psalmist says with their worship in the form of loving us in the form of the most perfect butterhorn rolls.

—I miss my family. I haven’t been to Missouri since February (do I even need to tell you why?)—the longest I’ve ever gone without seeing my grandparents. My extended family is very close. But the entire family hasn’t gathered together without a single one of us missing in three years—and there have been births and weddings and moves and surgeries and many events we would have given anything to be there for in those three years. So I may have shed a few tears over my buttery, perfect-in-every-way-minus-the-grandma-love-secret-ingredient butternhorn roll, hot from my own oven in Colorado, which is about 800 miles away from my Grandma’s oven. And today, that just feels far.

—I’m grateful for the purposeful connection God made between food and memory. We see this all over the Bible, and it has crucial implications for our life in Christ, but what a wonderful, delightful mercy that we get to experience shadows of it in the day-to-day of our lives.

One of the things I love most about family gatherings is the telling and the re-telling, the corrections and clarifications, of family stories that come in a dependable rhythm at every holiday meal. The best ones never lose their ability to make every one of us laugh.

I like to imagine a day, after our Redeemer has made all things new, when my family will be gathered together telling the old stories, eating Grandma’s butternhorn rolls (I’m telling you, those babies will be in the new heavens and new earth), in the perfect and complete presence of God. Head reared back, our Father will be laughing with us, saying “Oh, I remember it perfectly. That’s story gets me every time,” and adding his own stories of moments from our family’s life together that made him laugh or brought him joy.

And somehow imagining and longing for life in that City makes it seem a little nearer, and makes it a little easier to be eating a butternhorn roll without all of them today.