Today I’m sharing three stories of forgiveness that blew my mind.

Imagine you’ve made a video about an issue you really care about. You’ve spent hours producing it and you feel vulnerable about telling the world what you think, but you also feel proud of what you’ve created.

You then post it online and someone comments underneath it, ‘You’re a piece of shit.’

How would you react?

This didn’t happen to me, it happened to the actor, writer and activist Dylan Marron.

Would you be upset? Angry? Maybe just ignore it?

I bet what you wouldn’t do is call up the person who wrote it, ask them how they are (in a really friendly voice) and then enquire as to why they wrote it – with a genuine curiosity to find out.

This is what Dylan does is his podcast series, ‘Conversations with People who Hate Me’.

I found it completely intriguing, inspiring and captivating listening.

The conversations follow a similar pattern. They start with the person retracting the insult and admitting they got a bit carried away, before explaining what it was about what Dylan said that they disagreed with.

By the end of the conversations, they have seen each other as humans rather than two usernames attacking each other on the internet, and have usually genuinely bonded.

Now, imagine that you are a 10-year-old black kid taking part in a Scout parade and white people start throwing stones at you. When you get home your mum explains that some people hate you just because of the colour of your skin.

Isn’t it quite likely you would start to fear and hate white people?

What you probably wouldn’t do is spend years reading all the books you could on racism and white supremacy in an attempt to understand why people might hate you for being black.

What you almost certainly wouldn’t do, is arrange to meet one of the leaders of the KKK so that you could ask him questions about his beliefs, invite him back to your house for dinner, befriend him and start to attend KKK rallies so you could understand them better.

That is what musician Darly Davis did. He tells the story and it ends with the leader leaving the KKK and giving Daryl his Klan robe.

I found this awe-inspiring.

If your son had been murdered, would you be willing to meet the man who did it while he was in prison and ask him why? Would knowing that he was just doing it to be part of a gang make you more or less angry?

When he got out of prison, would you support him in getting a degree and a job so that he can make something of this life? That is what David and Joan did. You can listen to the story in the Radio 4 series ‘@04’. It moved me to tears several times.

Our media is full of people being shamed for their behaviour, and so rarely are there stories that really seek to understand why someone did something awful.

To my mind, this leads to a culture in which we think some people are just ‘bad’ or ‘evil’. It leads to a barbaric criminal justice system that throws people in jail to rot, without considering what led them to commit their crime. It means we end up with leaders like Donald Trump, who are willing to subject themselves to the shaming media because they are shameless. A more sensitive human wouldn’t be able to take it.

What’s incredibly inspiring to me about all of the people I have mentioned is that even when someone has verbally or physically abused them, even when someone has murdered their son, they chose not to write the perpetrators off. They stood firm in their belief that this is another human being who deserves understanding and forgiveness.

I’m sharing these stories with you because, when I heard them, they deeply inspired me. They showed me that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary acts of forgiveness that can transcend all the shaming and trolling that consumes so much of our social and national media.

And, hopefully, knowing that someone else has done it makes it seem a lot more possible that you or I could do it too.