Tonight Estie, Seth jr. and Emily, our three college students, come home from Indiana and Texas. If home is where the heart is, then coming home after being away at school or away anywhere in this cold, cruel world, is like rediscovering the best part of you – your heart.

We can become strangers to ourselves as we allow our souls to be extruded through the hard metal of a metaphysical die cast machine that comes to us in the form of alarm clocks, rush hour, a cascade of emails, meetings, and evenings in the numbing glow of a TV set.

The heart is a tender thing that, subjected to this kind of a regimen, becomes calloused. It retreats into the shadows. Occasionally some strand of beauty, poetry, deep laughter, or romance may touch and even startle that shy part of us that has gone into hiding.

Coming home can do that too. Home is a haven for memories of mom pulling apple pies from the oven, stories read before bedtime, family members who knew us and loved us before we ever put on some uniform of the workaday world.

If you find yourself making a pilgrimage back to that place where your heart was nurtured or if you're one waiting with the Welcome mat out, Thanksgiving is a great season to be intentional about reconnecting with the best parts of one another and yourself.

Of course many have no real home to return to and may even have become estranged from themselves at an early age. What we say to them in word and deed may be an indicator of how far from home we ourselves really are.