ICS: God’s Instrument to Shape my Life

"May God continue to use this school as a tool to shape the next generation, and may this school continue to glorify God in all it does." Erica Leung (ICS alumna - Class of 2008) likes to share her thoughts about how ICS has impacted her life.  

No institution is perfect, least of all ICS, and as a student, I did my share of complaining about every single fault I could find. Looking back now, however, I can see so clearly that the teachers and the weekly Chapel services were used very powerfully by God to shape me into the person I am now.



Every Thursday, all of the students would gather together within their respective age groups for a time of worship, and also to listen to a message delivered either by one of our teachers, or by a speaker they had specially invited. I first accepted Christ during one of those Thursday chapels, and the many speakers the teachers invited throughout the years instilled in me a desire to live for something greater than myself.

Erica (4th from right) met up with her former ICS classmates

The single greatest blessing God gave me, however, was the teachers. Truly, they were not just teachers to their students, but also mentors and friends. I remember trading jokes with some of them just as though they were my friends, and I remember one-on-one meetings with my homeroom teacher in which he sat me down, then asked, “How has your walk with God been?” I approached so many of these teachers over the years with questions I didn’t feel comfortable asking my parents, and they taught me so much about loving God and following him. Looking back now, especially as I now currently study at a very big public university in the States, I am so appreciative of having had such teachers who truly and so very genuinely cared about my well-being, spiritual or physical, throughout high school. Even now, three years later, when I meet up with them, I can feel their genuine care and concern. One teacher I met up with even told me that on the occasion that he prayed for me, he prayed that I would not put too much pressure on myself, something I had struggled with back in high school, and still struggle with now. Even if, in the seven or so years since he had taught me (he had only taught me in middle school), he had only prayed for me once, that already demonstrates to me the genuine concern that God has placed in his heart for his students, and this is just one example of the amazing teachers I have met here.

Erica (in the middle) with her former High School teacher and her classmate at a banquet

Because of the foundation of faith that ICS had laid out for me, the first thing I did when I stepped foot on the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, was find a church. All the desires and prayers for God to use me, and to allow me to experience of living for something bigger than myself, that the speakers during Chapel times had birthed in me have been answered beyond anything I could have expected in college through the local church ministry I became involved in. I still don’t know where exactly I will be going from here (I still have one more year of schooling left), but I know that, through the academic and spiritual foundation ICS had given me, I will be ready for whatever I end up doing.

2 Corinthians 4:7 – “But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”