A broken collarbone in high school did more than put Hunter Harrison on the sidelines. For a young wrestler who had wrapped much of his identity around competing, the injury forced him into a crisis that went well beyond Sports.
“That injury didn’t just break bone — it cracked my identity as a Christian. I had built my purpose around being a great wrestler, and when that was taken, I blamed God,” Harrison told IJR.
What followed was a lesson Harrison says he would encounter repeatedly.
“God doesn’t owe me anything. I’m not meant to see His whole plan. My job is to be faithful, even when I don’t understand,” he said.
Now 28, Harrison is pursuing a demanding goal: becoming a UFC fighter. And he believes he has roughly two years to make it happen.
With his eyes set on the UFC, Harrison is disciplined in his training, spending roughly five hours per day in the gym and striving for all dominant performances in his pro fights.
“All of the work is done on the front end of this. There are three five-minute rounds. … There’s no amount of cardio you can fit in or technique you can learn or magic pill,” Harrison shared in his video ahead of a fight. “It’s all the work – the first six months – to prepare for this moment.”
“Then my phone rang.”
After developing confidence as a fighter in his youth, Harrison turned to wrestling. The sport quickly “shattered” some of his assumptions about his abilities and where competition might take him in his younger years.
Later, Harrison received a call from a “D3 Christian school I barely knew” at the time, Wheaton College.
He arrived expecting success. He got humbled instead.
“But Wheaton humbled me more than anything before it,” Harrison told IJR. “I thought I’d dominate D3 since I was giving up the chance to walk on at a D1 ‘for God.’ Instead, I got destroyed in the practice room. Then I got destroyed even worse at my first open tournament.”
Bringing back similar questions about his Faith, he said, "I questioned God again — why call me to this tiny school if I wasn’t meant to be great?”
“My career was full of disappointment, injuries, and finally a season cut short by COVID,” Harrison said.
With competitive wrestling behind him, Harrison entered the corporate world and worked in medical device sales. But fighting wasn't finished with him.
He eventually returned to an MMA gym, squeezing training into a schedule already packed with work.
“I would work during the day and train at night,” he said. “It was exhausting — coming home at 9:00 PM after training, eating dinner, and then starting my day as a salesman again at 7:00 AM the next morning.”
This time, however, he wasn't merely working out. Harrison started fighting.
“I started taking amateur fights, and I had a lot of success early on,” he shared.
That created some unusual overlap between his professional and fighting lives.
“I would show up to the hospital to have business meetings with surgeons and have to answer questions about why my face looked like pounded meat,” Harrison said. “At one point, my boss came to town for a quarterly ride-along just a few days after I had broken my nose in an amateur title fight. It was an interesting conversation, to say the least.”
Harrison faced a choice. He left his medical device sales job and committed himself to fighting, with his Faith playing a huge role in his decision to become a UFC fighter.
“I knew that if I wanted to find out what I was actually capable of, I had to give it a real shot,” Harrison said.
“That’s when I began to understand the pattern God had been showing me my entire life.”
Harrison had to lean on his Faith: “The scary part was trusting God without knowing what came next. I had spent years learning that lesson in wrestling — that God doesn’t owe me the outcome I want. Now I had to actually live it. I had to trust that if I obeyed Him and worked as hard as I could, He would direct me where He wanted me to go.”
He continued:
“He paints our lives one stroke at a time, and obedience makes the picture clearer. If He told us the whole plan, we’d try to ‘help Him out’ and ruin it. If God had told me when I was younger that I’d eventually become a fighter, I probably would’ve quit wrestling early to chase MMA. I would’ve missed the lessons, the relationships, the failures, and the character-building that forged me into a man hungry to compete in my late twenties — an age when most Sports are already out of reach.
But not MMA.
And that’s the beauty of God’s timing. What looked like setbacks were actually foundations. What felt like humiliation was preparation. What seemed like detours were the exact disciplines I needed — sacrifice, humility, grit, and obedience — the same fundamentals required in both the Christian walk and the fight game.”
His interpretation of the long road that brought him here, however, is already settled.
“God wasn’t delaying me,” Harrison said. “He was shaping me.”