Meet Tom Morrisey

Tom Morrisey is a widely published adventure-travel writer, a teaching member of the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, and a ni-dan (second degree black belt) in Ryokukai Karate-Do, as well as an angler, shooting-sports and motorsports enthusiast, cyclist, climber, Nordic and alpine skier, student pilot, backpacker and cave diver. He is also a popular Christian speaker and a lay evangelist active with youth and prison ministries. His first novel, Yucatan Deep, features cave diving legend Mike Bryant as he struggles with the death of his mentor and attempts to complete the exploration the a Mexican sinkhole that took his mentor's life.

Tom’s nonfiction book, Wild by Nature , was, he says, inspired by a dialogue that he had with a prisoner at a state correctional facility in Illinois during a prison revival tour.

“This young man commented to me that ‘Christians need to keep a low profile in prison, because Christians are perceived as being weak,’” Tom recalls. “And that absolutely floored me. I mean, look at the Gospels–-Jesus and the apostles slept rough, on the ground, under the stars. They sailed in storms. Peter swam naked in cold seas. And they traveled in country so hostile that they had to carry swords. Later on, Paul talks about being shipwrecked and, in an age when most people never left their hometowns, he traveled the length and breadth of the Roman Empire. Where’s the weakness in that?

“I realized that there was a need for a book that talked about coming to and growing in Christ in a manner that embraced an adventurous, even extreme, lifestyle,” Morrisey continues. “And as I’ve been blessed with just such a life, I decided to tell nine true stories from it, and use them to illustrate basic Christian principles.”

The result has been lauded as a type of writing that is unique in Christian literature, and a type of writing that reaches many of today’s action-oriented readers exactly where they live.

“I believe that the Gospels were written, not only to tell us that our Messiah has come, but also to give us a pattern – to show us how Jesus witnessed, so we can do the same,” Tom says. “And Jesus was intensely interested in reaching people where they happened to be, culturally. So I feel called by His example to do the same.”

Morrisey lives with his wife and daughter on a small farm in Jackson County, Michigan, and continues to be active in the adventurous life that inspired Wild by Nature.

Updated June 2003.