Message from the VP
Message from the Vice President of Mission and Ministry
Dear new student,
It is my hope that you will appreciate the gift and value of learning, grow in appreciation of your dignity, and learn how to think, feel, and cultivate an open and expansive heart.
It is my dream that you will always keep in mind that at the heart of our university are relationships. Through our relationships, we are able to see each other as a gift from God, to make “room” for each other, and to share each other’s struggles and burdens through dialogue and encounter. Always remember that it is through dialogue that we learn to acknowledge, appreciate, and love each other as children of God.
We do all this because love is at the heart of our university and because the Incarnate Word, God Himself, is Love. Hence, our primary focus is on shaping the human heart to bear witness to God’s loving and revealing presence in the world.
Our common call, then, is to incarnate God’s love via our actions, which must be filled with compassion, kindness, and boundary-breaking so as to go out to the margins and respond to our original call, expressly, to meet “our Lord Jesus Christ suffering in the multitude of the sick and infirm [who] seeks relief at our hands.” Concretely speaking, this means that we are a community characterized by right relationships, meekness, and humility, always striving to love so that we all may be one.
As you begin your time here, it is my prayer that your educational experience will not only be informational but also formational and, hopefully, truly transformational. I pray that your experience will be both an integrating and a liberating process so that you can become the image and likeness of God in the world.
Ultimately, it is my conviction that your educational experience is all about being “fully alive,” that is, being a human being who sees the world as God sees it, responds to it in love, compassion, and tenderness, and stands in solidarity with the poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalized through works of unity, reconciliation, justice, and peace.
It is my pleasure to welcome you to the University of the Incarnate Word. Make the best of your time here among us, and know that all of us who have already been here before you are here to help you become the best version of yourself you can ever be.