On the dark night of July 27, 2000, David Harris forgot to take out the trash. Thank God.
Had he remembered, Doris Harris, his wife of nearly 25 years, likely would have killed herself.
When Doris, suffering from insomnia and depressed to the point of suicide, went to throw something away in the early morning hours of what she planned to be the last day of her life, it wasn’t a fresh, empty bag; a banana peel; or coffee grinds she saw in the trashcan. It was a copy of The Alabama Baptist newspaper, lying face up.
In the upper left corner of the front page was a photo of a lighthouse. Doris knew it was Maine’s Portland Head Light. She knew because she collected lighthouse figurines and photos and because she’d taken a picture of the famous landmark during a tour of New England with David four years prior.
Doris picked up the paper.
“I saw it had Scripture underneath it,” she said.
The verse was 2 Samuel 22:29: “For thou art my lamp, O Lord; and the Lord will lighten my darkness.”
That’s all it took.
“I knew without a doubt … that was my miracle, the miracle that gave me the hope that I needed to keep on living,” said Doris, a member of Autumnwood Baptist Church, Decatur, in Morgan Baptist Association.
Doris’ darkness began in January 1997 after receiving a high-dosage shot of the steroid prednisone intended to treat the chronic ear, nose and throat infections that had moved into her lungs.
“After two days of the medication, I quit sleeping,” she said.
Five sleepless days later, Doris’ doctor told her the insomnia and disorientation she’d experienced for nearly a week were the results of steroid-induced psychosis.
“The steroids attach to the fatty cells in your brain and don’t flush through your system like other drugs,” Doris said. “I went for 10 weeks not knowing the season of the year, who I was talking to sometimes and not knowing what I was saying.”
Months later, she was diagnosed with full-blown depression, the result of a severe chemical imbalance in her brain.
Doris went on to experience many of its symptoms — dejection, withdrawal, feelings of guilt and plans of suicide — for nearly 10 years.
It was a decade-long tunnel with no light at the end, no light anywhere, save that one promise in Scripture she found and clung to for the next six years — that God would lighten her darkness.
“The thoughts of suicide remained, but I knew that there was a Greater Power looking over me during those times,” Doris said.
In the fall of 2006, through a new treatment for depression approved by the Food and Drug Administration in February that same year, God made good on His word.
In two weeks, “I was back to the happy, energetic person that I was before the darkness of severe depression that had engulfed me for so long,” she said. “I’m like a bird set free to soar.”
The members of Autumnwood Baptist who knew Doris before her bout with depression tell her they’re happy to “see the old Doris back.” Those that didn’t feel as though they’ve met someone who looks a lot like the Doris they knew but just can’t be.
“That paper in the trashcan wasn’t there by accident,” she said. “I don’t know why David didn’t take the trash out … unless he just forgot, but I do know that God had it there just for me at just the right time, and that is why I can share this story with others. I call [the Portland Head Light] my miracle lighthouse. I could see the light that night that I hadn’t seen in a very, very long time.”
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