Dearest Ursuline Families,

I hope you accumulated a trove of summer memories over the past few months! Though the ship of the 2024-2025 school year has set sail, I am still replaying some of my Best of Summer memories, especially as I think about this year’s theme, Encounter, and the many ways it manifested in my life over the summer.

In June, we journeyed with a group of Ursuline students to Costa Rica, anticipating a possible reunion with Costa Rican friends from the previous year. I was thrilled to learn our cohort would stay at the same retreat center. I couldn’t wait for the students to get out into the community, engage with the families and kids, and have similar experiences. Then the news came: our group would not be leaving the retreat center; our work would include intense manual labor at the retreat property. Though we knew we were there to serve in whatever capacity needed, the disappointment settled in as we realized it would be just us and three or four Ticos (a term for those native to Costa Rica) helping with the construction. There was some sadness in the missed opportunities to engage with the larger community as we had done in the past – no soccer games with the kids, no singing songs together in the church, no visits to the school. It was “ordinary work” with what felt like an ordinary Dallas group. However, something began to happen as we shifted our perspectives; this was an opportunity for an encounter loaded with truth, goodness, and beauty. We looked around at each other and the amazing country we were in, chose to be fully present and engaged, and turned to God in gratitude for this gift. We returned to Texas with hearts full of the goodness of those new relationships born of openness to the experience.

The experience of unexpected encounters was further echoed when, just a week later, we embarked on another journey, this time much closer to home. A week after returning from Costa Rica, nine students and a couple of faculty members gave me one of the greatest blessings of the summer when we took a group of students to the Steubenville Conference in Irving for the first time. It was at this conference that the theme Encounter surfaced. We were small in the sea of 4,000+ teenagers, but our nine girls arrived with open hearts and minds to whatever awaited them at the conference. Friday, we gathered as acquaintances, but over the weekend the students came together in prayer, opened their hearts to each other, built each other up, poured themselves out, and let God in. It was a choice to say Yes – to be there, to be open to awe and wonder, and to welcome the unexpected. The power of that Yes was remarkably transformative for them as individuals and as a small group in our community.

Encounters don't always come in grand settings or distant lands; sometimes, they happen in the most ordinary places. In early July, I ran into Dollar Tree to pick up some trinkets for my kids’ camp packages. I happened to get pulled deep into a conversation with an employee about how she missed her family members who live in Mississippi and her enduring love for the 4^th of July. This enthusiastic and patriotic Dollar Tree employee told me she dreamed of singing the National Anthem at the ballpark and before I knew it, the two of us were singing the National Anthem in the middle of her store. Truthfully, I’m a self-checkout person who aims to get in and out of a store in under five minutes, but I lost track of time and could have stayed another hour in the Dollar Tree with her. It was a convicting encounter and a reminder of what can happen when we choose to be present where we are and with those around us.

God has been speaking Encounter to me in loud ways. I cannot help but think that Encounter is a solution to what researchers are calling “The Epidemic of Loneliness” among teens. Encounter is about meeting each other face-to-face, recognizing the divine beauty in what is around us, seeking God’s presence within ourselves, welcoming relationships, slowing down, and saying Yes in complete openness to the unexpected.

Knowing that we were coming off the Sesquicentennial year, it’s been a running joke that the theme for this year should be 151. While Encounter does not carry the flashiness of the 150^th anniversary year, it is no less profound. It’s with the same intentionality as last year that we bring the theme forward into all we do. So, it is with a rush of eagerness and hopeful anticipation that we begin this year of Encounter.

May the million Encounters of this school year carry over to bless your family,

Mandy Briones
Dean of Students
469-232-1805