Everyone keeps telling me to forgive, and I am not even sure what the word means. Does forgiving someone mean saying that what they did was fine?

“Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.”

Leviticus 19 is a list of laws given to a young nation learning to live in close quarters. Sandwiched between rules about fair wages and honest scales sits an instruction about grudges, which tells you Israel's leaders treated a nursed grievance as a practical, community-wrecking problem rather than a private mood. Notice what the command regulates: what you do with the memory, not whether the wrong was real.

“Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye.”

Paul wrote to a mixed congregation in Colossae where Jewish and Gentile believers had every cultural reason to keep score against one another. His standard is not that they forget what happened but that they forgive as they were forgiven, which assumes a genuine debt that somebody chose to absorb. That is the shape of it: naming the wrong honestly, then refusing to keep charging for it.