Article January 27, 2003 Issue

A walk out of darkness into light

When Kenny Simmons found a way to feel closer to God, he also found a new life, a new job and home, and friends who care.

BY Warren Bolon Senior Writer

HE LOOKS ME IN THE EYE, smiles, offers his hand, and says, "Hi, I'm Kenny Simmons. Pleased to meet you." Don't bother looking in Kenny Simmons's eyes or at his bearing for shadows of his life on the streets, on drugs, in jail. I saw none. When he talks about his past, it's as though he's describing another person, someone he only vaguely recalls.

Simmons remembers clearly, though, how he became homeless and jobless. "I was addicted to cocaine and to alcohol, and my life at that time had crumbled. I lost a good job and was in total darkness. It seemed as though I was washed up.

"I was living with a young lady, and she happened to be a drug pusher. That made it even easier for me to get drugs. To somebody else, it might have seemed like a really opportune thing to be in that situation. But for me, the more drugs I got the more miserable I became... I wasn't even enjoying getting high anymore." He felt he was spiraling downward into "a really deep, dark pit." But even amid the misery and darkness, in his clearer moments he knew he had to find a way out. Underneath the hunger for cocaine and alcohol there was a deeper hunger, a spiritual hunger, buried yet asking to be fed.

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