BY NICHOLAS CONNER
Certified Peer Support Worker 
Community Care Manager
Bernalillo County

In March of 2024 I attended Dr. Jordan Peterson’s lecture in Colorado Springs for his new book, We Who Wrestle with God. It’s been years since I stepped away from the church, from ministry, worship, and the identity I once carried as a follower of Christ. I did not leave in anger so much as hurt, confusion and exhaustion. Life and experience stripped away what I thought I believed, leaving something raw and unguarded in its place.

And yet, as I sat listening to Peterson speak about the Bible, not as a rigid rulebook but as a living record of the human psyche, something in me stirred. He spoke about Jacob wrestling with God, not as a story about obedience, but as an image of the soul in conflict. To wrestle with God, he said, is to engage fully with truth, conscience, and suffering, even when you don’t understand it, and even when you’re furious at it.

After repeatedly listening to the lecture to fully grasp the articulation, expression and interpretations of its context, it took three full listens and finally, it hit home.

I’ve wrestled with God in my own way, through addiction, incarceration, loss, and recovery. I’ve cursed Him, ignored Him, bargained with Him, and finally just sat in silence, learning to live without expecting an answer. But in that silence, something else took shape, the understanding that maybe wrestling is the answer.

Peterson framed the Bible as a psychological map, a set of archetypal stories that teach us how to walk the razor’s edge between chaos and order. Cain and Abel. Jacob and the angel. Jonah and the whale. They’re not just tales of divine encounters; they’re about us, about envy, pride, responsibility, and transformation.

When I look at my life through that lens, I see every relapse, every night in a cell, every moment of regret as part of the same archetypal battle, the human struggle to rise, to make meaning out of pain, to offer something honest back to the world.

Peterson says that meaning is the antidote to suffering. In my experience, he’s right. Not the hollow kind of meaning that hides behind clichés, but the kind you earn when you take responsibility for your own life and the lives you touch. Every day I walk alongside people trying to rebuild after addiction, incarceration, and trauma. I see the same spark in them that Peterson spoke of, that image of God that refuses to be extinguished, even after everything.

I don’t know if I’ll ever “return” to faith in the old sense. But I’ve learned this: wrestling with God is still a form of worship. Searching for truth, taking responsibility, and striving to live in gratitude, those are sacred acts, even when no one’s watching.

And maybe that’s the point. To wrestle is to remain engaged, not defeated, not complacent, but alive.