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CBN.com – "I could not take the pain anymore. It was unbearable," says Debbie. "I was on so much morphine and it still wasn't helping, and I decided, This is it. I want to die. I prayed out loud and begged God. I asked Him to kill me: 'If You don't, I will take my own life.'"
Debbie Keith of Evansville, Indiana, had been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a herniated disc in her neck, osteoarthritis, and an inherited spine-deforming disease called ankylosing spondylistis. Doctors had to install a morphine pump inside her pelvis because of her constant need for the drug. The pain was so bad that Debbie used a wheelchair in her house to keep from jarring her spine by walking.
"After a certain amount of time, the morphine wasn't even taking care of the pain," she reveals. "The doctor had finally given up on me, and I was left on my own in a morphine addiction with no way to go but out. I had planned on dying."
Debbie's neighbor, Yolanda, noticed her decline into depression.
Says Yolanda, "She didn't care about anything. She didn't care about her children, her grandchildren. She just, in a sense, wanted to give it all up, chuck it all in."
"I had gotten into such a deep state of depression," Debbie explains, "that I even felt as though God had left me. That's when I decided to take my own life."
But Yolanda hadn't given up on Debbie.
"I kept praying," says Yolanda. "I said, 'God, help her. She is not going to be able to endure this any longer. You have got to help her. You have got to intervene on her behalf. She doesn't realize how much you love her.'"
Before she did something drastic to herself, Debbie turned to someone she knew who would give her the guidance and the prayer that she needed.
"I called a 700 Club Prayer Counselor to pray for me," she says. "I knew I was getting in a bad shape at that time. I knew I was getting into trouble. She [the prayer counselor] got a word of knowledge from the Lord that He was bringing me through. That was the only thing that I had to hold onto during that time. The Lord spoke to my heart, 'Fast and pray.'"
Along with fasting, praying, and reading the Bible, Debbie watched The 700 Club.
"Pat Robertson had a word of knowledge that said someone was stricken with terror by the night, a terrible fear of darkness," she recalls.
"The Lord is delivering somebody from this terrible thing dealing with the night. It may be that you are just terribly afraid of the night or of the dark, but God is just setting you free of fear and terror," Pat Robertson said on The 700 Club that day Debbie was watching. "The Lord's Spirit is moving in your life right at this moment."
"That was me," Debbie says. "Since I was very young, I was terrified of the dark to the point where I would sleep during the day and stay awake at night. I felt it go when he spoke that. I gave it to the Lord, and it is gone. I can sleep at night and I am not afraid."
Debbie was about to experience another deliverance.
"I remember God said, 'Get up and go eat,' so I did, and I came back here and I sat down," she says. "I was halfway through what I was eating when it dawned on me that I wasn't in any pain. I stood up really quickly and I thought, Wait a minute. What's wrong? I realized that at that moment God had healed me. I was without pain. I could bend. I could stretch. I stopped taking the morphine. I had no withdrawal problems at all."
"When I came and knocked on the door," says Yolanda, "I saw this bright, cheerful person hopping around the house … I looked and I said, 'Thank you, Jesus!' He did it."
"I am eating and feeling fine and about ready to go on a vacation," Debbie says smiling. "I was at the lowest point, and He picked me up. I am not in pain. I am not a morphine addict any longer. I praise the Lord!"
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