About Malcolm
I was born in 1965 in Oamaru, New Zealand, and have lived a life that has taken me through a rather unlikely collection of places, professions, experiences and questions.
In 1986 I married Tania, and together we have raised three wonderful adult children. Our home is now in Rotorua, in the North Island of New Zealand, where our family also includes a lively collection of pets — including a cat who, rather than being adopted by us, seems to have decided that we belonged to her.
My working life has been equally varied. I have been a farm labourer, computer shop retailer, company director, Salvation Army officer and Baptist ordained minister. I have worked as an independent Bible teacher, and today much of my working life is expressed through creative writing, game development and the use of various forms of digital media.
Perhaps the common thread running through all those different chapters is curiosity.
I have always wanted to understand things — not simply what something is, but why it is, what lies beneath it, and what it reveals about being human.
What I Write About
My writing sits at the intersection of philosophy, Christian thought, psychology, culture and lived experience.
I am interested in the forces that shape human beings — truth, suffering, responsibility, faith, identity, beauty, freedom, agency and transcendence — and in the lifelong process of becoming more fully human.
Through essays, poetry, spoken word, biblical reflection and other creative forms, I explore the deeper patterns beneath modern life and the challenges of maturation in an age increasingly shaped by distraction, performance and collective certainty.
I am particularly interested in the places where ideas meet life.
Philosophy is not merely something to study.
Faith is not merely something to profess.
Psychology is not merely something to diagnose.
And experience is not merely something to survive.
Each of these can become part of the difficult and sometimes beautiful work of learning what it means to be human.
I write at the intersection of philosophy, Christian thought, psychology, culture, and lived experience. My work explores the forces that shape human beings — truth, suffering, responsibility, faith, identity, beauty, and transcendence — and the lifelong process of becoming more fully human.
A Life That Has Not Been Ordinary
I live within the autistic spectrum and with complex health circumstances. This means that daily life is often challenging, sometimes exhausting, and rarely quite ordinary.
It has also taught me that human beings are considerably more complicated than the categories we often use to describe them.
One of the defining chapters of my life came through being falsely accused of a sexual offence, resulting in a period of imprisonment.
I do not regard that experience as the sum of who I am. But I cannot pretend that it did not profoundly shape me.
It stripped away assumptions I had previously taken for granted. It brought loss, uncertainty and the experience of seeing just how easily human systems, relationships and perceptions can become broken or misaligned.
It forced me to confront questions I might otherwise have continued to examine from a comfortable distance.
What is truth when people disagree about reality?
What happens to identity when the structures that once gave it stability disappear?
What does responsibility mean when circumstances constrain what we can do?
What remains when certainty is stripped away?
And perhaps most importantly:
How does a person reconstruct a life without simply reconstructing the same illusions?
Those questions continue to find their way into my writing.
Why Do I Write?
Because something within me compels me to use words and creativity to engage existentially with the life and reality into which I have been cast.
Writing is my way of making sense.
It is a way of bearing witness.
It is a way of wrestling with questions that do not have convenient answers.
And sometimes it is simply a way of taking something difficult, confusing or beautiful and giving it form.
I don’t write because I believe I have arrived at all the answers.
Quite the opposite.
I write because the questions matter.
Christian faith remains central to that journey for me. My understanding of Christ, Scripture, human existence, grace, freedom and new creation continues to develop through reading, thinking, questioning and living.
I am less interested in defending a position simply because it is familiar than I am in discovering whether what I believe can withstand honest examination.
That means some of my writing may challenge.
Some may encourage.
Some may provoke disagreement.
And occasionally, I hope, something will simply cause a person to stop for a moment and see the world differently.
What Do I Expect From My Readers?
Not agreement.
Not applause.
Not certainty.
Only genuine engagement, honest thought and perhaps a moment of reflection.
Read critically.
Question what I write.
Disagree where you think I am wrong.
Take what is useful and wrestle with what isn’t.
If something I have written causes you to think more deeply about faith, yourself, another person, or the world we inhabit, then the writing has already achieved something worthwhile.
Because ultimately, JourneeMan is not about having the last word.
It is about continuing the journey.
And perhaps that is what the name means after all.
We are all travellers.
None of us has finished becoming.