Some of us, no matter how many times we ask for God’s forgiveness, still feel as though the things we’ve done are unforgiveable. We feel as though a just God wouldn’t be able to forgive our most heinous and agregious acts. I’ve been struggling with this myself in the past few months, repeatedly feeling the need to ask for forgiveness, as if there comes a point where God says, “Okay, he must really mean it since he’s asked me 10 times.”

For these people, the struggle lies in our inability to forgive ourselves. We should feel terrible about the things we’ve done, but we also must recognize our human frailty and the fact that no matter how hard we try we’ll continue to sin our entire lives. This is tough for me to do, and I imagine many others feel the same way.

There are others who bring their sins before God, but don’t really ask for forgiveness at all. What they really do is ask for their behavior to be excused. Whereas the first group focuses so much on the horror of their sins that they are unable to get over them, the second group gets over their sins too easily. They focus on the fact that they are flawed, and reason that many of the things they do can be excused due to their sinful nature. They spend very little time focusing on their sin at all. They reason that since they’ll be sinners their whole lives anyway, their sins should be acknowlegded briefly, and that he will excuse us since he knows that we’ll always be sinners.

Up until the past few months, I lived in this way, casually mentioning to God the things I had done but not really thinking about the gravity of those sins. It was almost as if I would think to myself, “I know I did this horrible thing Lord, but look at all the good things I do!” I made light of my sin and convinced myself that the good outweighed the bad.

I’m not sure which is a more difficult problem to deal with. Is it easier to take your sin more seriously or to learn how to forgive yourself? I have no idea – I didn’t learn how to deal with my first problem before I swung to the other side of the pendulum. I think understanding of true forgiveness comes with the realization that our sins truly are horrible and offensive to God, and the knowing that we need to honestly bring those sins before him and admit how flawed we are. But then, once the realization has been made and we’ve truly asked for forgiveness, we need to be able to move on. We shouldn’t necessarily forget, and must try to avoid doing the same things over and over again. But we also need to live without feeling sorry for ourselves, without beating ourselves up. We need to live with the joy and peace that comes from knowing that our sins truly are forgiven.

I’m not there yet. I hope you can forgive me.