..........back to square one.

Recently, I've been arguing with myself. This same argument has been going on for years, and I want to solve the problem and put it to rest. It concerns my religious beliefs and doctrines of Christianity. Every time that I seem to come to terms with "forgiveness", our minister brings up the topic again, and I really don't know quite where I stand. When I say the Lord's Prayer, I always cringe when I get to the part; "And forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." Taken in context, that's a pretty tall order. My interpretation is that we are asking God to forgive us our sins as we have forgiven those who have wronged us. I don't know about you, but there are a lot of folks through the years that have done wrong towards me and I don't know if my brand of forgiveness is good enough. I don't even know that I know what true forgiveness on the human level is. Man, I'm getting myself even more confused! Is forgiveness not taking revenge against those who have wronged you? Is forgiveness a welcoming of those who have wronged you back into "the circle of trust" (as Jack Burns of Meet the Parents would say)? Is forgiveness also forgetting? If we truly forgive, do we also forget? My feeling about the whole thing is that I caution against the same thing happening to me again via the original offender. I guess that any answer that I would get here on earth would be an interpretation. In the end, I know that I have often asked God to forgive me of the same sin on multiple occasions; so, that says to me that if God forgave me once, He also welcomed me back with the possibility of having the same thing happen again. Did I just answer my own question?