Liebing April 2026

Dear friends and family,

When I arrived in Malawi more than four and a half years ago, I was filled with nervous excitement that the Lord had finally given me the opportunity to serve Him on the foreign mission field. After years of my heart feeling a near constant outward tug, my eye being always half on the horizon, and my ears itching when I heard of kingdom work in foreign cultures, He had opened the doors and allowed me to come to Rafiki Malawi, where my love for classical education and foreign missions met. If you have been reading my newsletters and keeping in touch over these years, you will know that living and working in Malawi has been a riotous collage of joy and sorrow, hard work and sweet moments, adventure and mundane details, thrilling progress, and continuous prayers overs stubborn obstacles. And always, always, the guiding grace of my Father has sustained me, and every season has shown me more of His beauty and faithfulness.

Now I am asking for His patient and good hand to clasp me tight as He leads me through another change. Over the last six to eight months, a number of circumstances and opportunities converged in such a way that I felt the Lord was pushing me to seriously consider if He was setting me on a path that led out of Malawi. I have spent much time in prayer and seeking counsel as I asked the Lord to make His will clear, and a few months ago, I felt Him giving me peace and confidence that it was time to return to the U.S.. I am set to leave Malawi and return to the States in May, where I will be moving after many years back to my hometown of Cincinnati and taking up a role with Mars Hill Academy in which I will be doing a mixture of teaching and rhetoric school principal duties. 

I am thrilled at the prospect of being part of my family’s life in Cincinnati, and excited to continue to serve the Lord in classical Christian education and all the discipleship that entails. On the other hand, this season of goodbyes and change in Malawi is full of grief. I have come to deeply love this place and this people, and I have spent years building a life here and enough cultural understanding for my friends to cheerfully say, “you are Malawian now!” I have been privileged to watch the Lord bring much change and growth in this Rafiki Village—in the resident kids, in the functioning of the school, in the staffing of the Village, in my church, and in my staff’s teaching ability, and love for the Word of God. It is very painful to say goodbye and to see the grief in their eyes. 

Goodbyes are not natural between brothers and sisters who are united in Christ, and who have worked and lived and studied and strained together. When those goodbyes mean that we will be separated by continents and oceans and cultures, it is especially hard. And yet, I am also grateful as I look around and see that the school is more stable, the teachers more capable, my head teachers more equipped to lead, the general staff of the Village stronger than it was before. The Lord does not need me in order to carry on His work, and it is always a dangerous place to be when we begin to feel that we are necessary—only Christ is Savior. So I have been encouraging my staff here that the Lord will give them all that they need, and that our bond is eternal, not to be broken by temporal time and space. I will be leaving my Assistant Headmaster, Emmanuel, in the role of acting Rafiki School Headmaster until the Home Office can identify a new missionary Headmaster to replace me, and he and my other heads are going to have to work hard, but are very able. The McDaniel family will continue to be here leading the Village administration and finances, and May Nealey continues to lead the RICE Program. I know that the Lord will give them all that they need to carry the work forward here. 

As for me, I am so very grateful for the time the Lord has given me here—it has been one of the greatest and weightiest joys of my life to love and serve these people in Malawi. It has also been an amazing honor to be supported and loved and prayed for by all of you who sent me here and have made it possible for me to remain in service for close to 5 years. I cannot begin to adequately articulate my gratitude—since the day I started pursuing this path to Malawi, the Lord surrounded me by friends and family who ensured that I never lacked anything that could be humanly given. I have never had a worry on the financial front; I have never gone a month without friends and supporters reaching out to me with gifts, prayers, words of encouragement, and love. Thank you, thank you. I ask that you continue to pray—for my last days in Malawi and all of the logistical and emotional transitions ahead, for my dear Malawian head teachers who will take up my work as I go, for the missionary team here as they readjust to one less team member, for the resident students as they say goodbye to another missionary who has been an integral part of their lives, for the teachers as they carry on the work of discipleship and biblical training in the school. Most of all, pray for the Lord’s faithfulness and the power of His Word to be clearly shown as not only sufficient, but most glorious—for all to see that the Lord will build his church, and His kingdom will advance despite all changes and times and seasons. 

My heart for foreign missions remains as warm as ever, my love for Malawi deep and tender, and my confidence in the eternal advancement of His church unshaken. As I enter a new arena of kingdom service, I pray that your love for His work here at Rafiki and all around the world also remains steadfast and passionate. We move ever further up and further in for His glory!

Some of the places and faces that have become dear to me.

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