Harrison Flowers
By the time the argument breaks out, the game has been going for a while.
On the prison court, the air is filled with sweat and noise—soles skidding across the floor, the echo of the ball, the short bursts of laughter and trash talk that help men forget, for an hour, where they are. For most guys, it’s just a game. For Kenny Simpson, it’s more.
A hard foul stops the play cold. One man hits the floor, then springs up swearing, his anger
snapping through the air like a whip.
Kenny steps toward him.
“Hey, man,” he said, “just clear your head. We’re just out here to have fun. Don’t worry about what that dude’s got going on. He probably didn’t even mean to do it.” Instantly, the player on the receiving end of the foul swings his hostility away from the man who knocked him down and turns it on Kenny instead. Kenny doesn’t flinch. He’s used to carrying weight that isn’t his.
He explains it simply: he took a vocation and calling survey and scored full marks in mercy and hospitality.
“It doesn’t bother me that he channeled the anger towards me,” he said. “Because I know I’m trying to help the other dude. I’m trying to help him calm down.”
Eventually, the man simmers down. The ball is checked back in. The game continues. On the surface, nothing spectacular has happened. No sermon was preached. No Bible verses were quoted. But something in the atmosphere changed. In prison, the court has become Kenny’s pulpit.
From Friday Night Lights to the Camera Lens
Long before prison yards and rec courts, Kenny’s life revolved around sports.
“I was a sports fanatic,” he said. “I would always be doing sports.” He grew up attending a large 6A high school where every morning began with a student-produced news show. The highlight of his week came when they rolled footage from the football games: images of helmets colliding under the lights, bands playing, crowds roaring.
“They would always give us presentations of what had happened throughout the week,” he said.
“Seeing the amazing pictures that they had created through the camera of our football
games and stuff like that, and how they captured certain moments—I was like, I want to do that.”
After his sophomore football season ended, he found himself on the other side of the lens. He started taking photography classes on the side, not through school but wherever he could, slowly building a portfolio. He discovered something that never left him.
“It’s crazy how much emotion you can put into a picture,” he said. “Without even knowing a
person, you can look at a picture and just tell. You can put so much emotion into it.”
Photography taught him that stories could be told without a single word. Long before he
would learn formal language for mercy, he was already drawn to the emotional weight people carried.
Losing the Camera, Finding a New Medium
Years later, that camera is gone. Prison doesn’t offer much in the way of photography.
“You can’t really pursue photography here,” Kenny said. “I wish I could. I would capture a
whole lot of moments here.” Instead, he’s had to find another way to tell stories—another way to show people something about themselves, and about God. What he does have are sports.
“I like to play sports,” he said. “I’m very, very good at it.”
Basketball, football, softball, and soccer; he would play almost anything that involves a ball, a team, and a set of rules. But for Kenny, the real rules he’s playing by are spiritual. He looks around at the men on the court, guys who “don’t really know anything about this… or who don’t really know anything about God,” and he sees a mission field.
During games, when tempers begin to fray, that’s when Kenny steps into his role.
“All throughout our basketball games or softball games, I’m that encouraging being,” he said. “When somebody gets upset or angry, I’m like, ‘Hey, man, we’re just out here to have fun. Let’s continue to have our fun and just enjoy the game.’”
To someone watching, it might just look like keeping the peace. To Kenny, it’s the gospel lived out in real time—choosing peace over pride.
The Wounds Behind the Mercy
Kenny’s instinct to absorb anger and offer calm didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from a childhood marked more by pain than by peace.
“From the ages of zero to ten, I don’t ever remember going to church,” he said. What Kenny said he does remember is “a lot of pain, abuse every day, sexual abuse about halfway through that.”
The one bright light in that darkness was his grandfather, “the most important man” in his
life. His grandpa did everything with him. This relationship is etched, literally, into Kenny’s skin.
There’s a train on his chest, for the mornings they spent waking up early to watch the Antique Road Show. On his shoulder, there’s a windmill, a reference to the time his grandfather bought him a .22 rifle and he used the windmills for target practice. His grandfather owned a pocket watch he loved. One day, teenage Kenny, goofing around, shot a hole right through that watch.
Those memories are anchored in ink and story. But there is one memory that almost destroyed Kenny: his grandfather died in his garden, and didn’t find out until two years later, when he was twelve.
“That really put me in a slot,” Kenny said. “It dropped me all the way down into a deep, dark hole.”
Home offered no refuge. When his biological mother found out what he had endured, her reaction was not protection but rejection.
“After my real mom found out that I was actually abused, she threw me to the streets at the age of ten,” he said. “I was on my own for about a month.”
A new family eventually took him in, telling him they were Christians. Kenny believes they might have been, deep down, but at that time their patterns toward him were anything but Christlike:
“They mentally abused me almost every day,” he said. And yet, through that broken doorway, he was introduced to church—an old white building with wooden pews and hymnals, singing songs like “Father Abraham” weekend after weekend. It was imperfect, but it was a start. At thirteen, he began attending Falls Creek, a major youth camp in Davis, Oklahoma. For the first two years, he was mostly there to have fun. By the third year, something shifted. He took it seriously and finally committed to God. He believes that’s when he was saved.
The next year, his faith deepened. Later, he returned as a sponsor, helping other teenagers discover why they were there. He went on missions to other states with Emmanuel Baptist
Church in Enid, Oklahoma, serving people he’d never met. But pain circled back because of his lack of a strong support system. Another devastating event later in life, combined with immaturity and a lack of support, knocked him into yet another deep, dark hole.
“And it led me to commit a crime,” he said. “It led me to prison.”
Maturing Behind Bars, Ministering Between the Lines
Prison could have been the end of Kenny’s story. Instead, it became where his calling came into focus.
“Since then, I have greatly matured in my mind,” he said. “And I believe I’m ready to go back out there and change the world. Yeah, because I believe I can.”
The men around him are more than fellow inmates; they’re neighbors, fathers and sons trying to find some way to cope with everything they’ve lost. Kenny has watched them ride emotional roller coasters.
“Being in prison, I’ve seen all the emotional hurt and all the roller coasters that people go through, and all the loss that they experience and the things that have been taken away from them,” he said.
When Kenny gets out, he wants to apply to be a re-entry rehab counselor.
“I want to counsel people who are coming out of prison,” he said, “and shake them back into the world culture.”
It’s not an abstract dream. He’s already rehearsing the role in every pickup game he plays.
