Know your rights

Originally appeared on spirituality.com

“Annul.” It means to “to obliterate, reduce to nothing.” Not just wrestle with, or challenge, or deal with from time to time. Obliterate, make invalid. There’s really no wiggle room in that description!

The strong legalistic language in this passage from the book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, speaks to this concept of annulment and its relation to health, “Let us banish sickness as an outlaw, and abide by the rule of perpetual harmony, — God’s law. It is man’s moral right to annul an unjust sentence, a sentence never inflicted by divine authority.” This passage speaks to a central theme in Christian Science—that God’s law of harmony equips us with a natural tendency toward health and happiness. And that we can exercise our right to dominion from sickness through prayer.

I remember a time when I woke up in the middle of the night feeling sick, with all the depressingly familiar symptoms of a heavy cold or flu coming on. The timetable of misery loomed—how long could I expect this “unjust sentence” to last? I had a lot planned for the coming week, and thinking about the timing of all this was actually making me angry. Sleep no longer seemed like a possibility.

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