This is a good discussion, I've enjoyed reading the comments. I'd like to share two thoughts that have helped me overcome events in my life that not only hurt me deeply but influenced my growing-up and personality a great deal in a terribly negative way and how I've learned to believe what "forgiveness" really means.

I was raised in a church that believed only its own members had even the remotest chance for eternal salvation. I was always taught (and believed until I knew better) to fear God - it took me a long time to comprehend the love of God and that God loves me and understands who I am and doesn't expect me to be like everyone else. When, through years of soul searching, I knew I couldn't pretend to believe what this church taught and I left, my family disowned me. I should have seen that coming but I didn't and it nearly killed me.

For a long time I carried almost crippling pain and disappointment in my heart. My family eventually realized, after other family members also left this church, that I wasn't mean-spirited, I had done what I believed I had to do. Apologies were made and things were better but I couldn't get past what had happened - I wanted to unconditionally forgive but I couldn't, I felt guilty for things I'd said but didn't know how to forgive myself, I know myself well enough to know that I'm so far from being the person I'd been taught God expected me to be that I almost drifted away from all facets of organized religion thinking faith was basically a futile concept.

THEN, I heard someone say one simple sentence that seemed to make all the difference in the world. The point made was that God forgives us when we ask for forgiveness like when words are erased from a blackboard. Chalk words erased from a blackboard are gone. When we ask God to forgive us, our sins are gone, they don't exist anymore.

The other idea that has helped me is my belief that our heavenly father knows and loves his earthly children the exact same way our earthly fathers should know and love their children, for who they are. I don't believe God expects us all to be the same, believe the same way, or do anything the same way anymore than an earthly father should.

If anything good has come from what I endured growing-up, it has been that as a parent myself, I want my child to find what's right for her and I don't think anything hurtful she could ever do and later apologize for would not deserve being forgiven.

Life is very complicated, isn't it? We all grow-up the product of what we're taught, our successes, our failures, but I believe when the day came that I took the blackboard realization to heart was the day I really learned to forgive myself and truly forgive others.