Girl on the Brink: Surviving Desperate Times with Desperate Measures

Even when life is bad, it soon chirps along like a spring-born sparrow.

While the bad part of our lives don’t change at the core, we somehow manage to hone the surface to make them look okay; sometimes even great.

Used car dealers are good at this. They can take a damaged car, even when structural integrity of the car is compromised, and make it look like it rolled off a factory showroom.

Thankfully, we have services, such as Carfax, to help us determine an automobile’s history and make a wise-buying decision.

Unfortunately, no comparable service exists to examine a person’s life and whether their history shows any deficits, but I’m sure the day is coming.

Increasingly, employers use a panoply of tools to check out potential employees—background and credit checks, the Internet, verifying degrees and certifications. The list goes on and on.

The next thing you know they’ll be asking new hires to donate a pint of blood to screen for infectious diseases.

The tools employers use are also available to daters, but I don’t think many of us go beyond googling someone’s name to examine their digital hygiene.

I know I don’t, and it sort of becomes a game to dig for information when the first and second pages of a search-engine results don’t turn up much.

When we find incidents of indiscretion, misbehavior or both, should we eschew that person and move on to the next? When you’re married and that happens, family counselors urge us to forgive. Sometimes, employers do it but only when they have time and money already vested in an employee.

I can’t think of one example where an employer went through and hired a person after discovering bad credit or a criminal record. To be honest, it would be hard for me not to align my values with an employer if I learned that I’d be going out with a man who, for example, beat his ex wife.

Such situations beg the question, “Do people deserve a second chance?”

As we enter the season of giving, let me say that forgiving may be this season’s best gift. That’s because it might be the one gift that will give back to you in ways that money never will.