Valentine's Day is a wonderful opportunity to show our feelings, our hopes for future, and our fond memories of past. It should also be a day that we show our love for who we are, where we came from, and where we intend to go. Wait a minute - loving yourself can go to extremes. We can lavish great luxuries on ourselves, much to boredom of friends and those close to us, or we can feel guilty about caring about ourselves. There is a happy medium - a point that we can touch on that will let our heart know we care about person it is beating for, and let our family and friends know that if we care about ourselves, we are well equipped to care about them.

Picture with me a ladder, a straight ladder with no supports. Not a stepladder or an extension ladder but type you would lean up against house to climb up on roof. Picture it as long as your imagination will allow you. Let bottom of ladder represent your birth into this world and very top of ladder represent your departure from it.

Stand this ladder in an upright position for it is going to represent all your life from start to finish. If you picture long life for yourself, see ladder extending to a great height, even out of sight, it goes so high.

Now how is this ladder supported? It is supported by standing it on solid ground. The solid ground represents, among other things, faith, integrity and truth. Remember ladder represents you. Let it represent you well after your departure. If people have nothing to say about you after your departure, then perhaps you didn't do all you could have. Let foundation for your ladder come from a solid philosophy about life. Let it be philosophy of a winner. Let it be philosophy of one who has experienced both winning and loosing for life is a mixture of up and down. You cannot expect to win at all things but you can expect to receive all that life has to offer if you will take good with bad, mix them together, knowing that all things work together for good and hopefully your life will make a statement in your philosophy that there was more good than bad.

Let rungs represent your successes. You can picture as many rungs as you want on this ladder because it is your ladder. You and you alone are responsible for it. Let rungs also represent your failures for there will be many throughout your lifetime. As you venture deeper into life, years having passed by, you can look back and hopefully success/failure ratio will be to your benefit. I hope you do not look back and say, "My, what a waste." Others might say that about you, but not you. There will always be jealousy from others because of your accomplishments. There will also be those who will tell you, "I told you so." Pay no attention to them. Get as far away from them as possible. Their goal is to make everyone else look bad and they look good. You do not need them on your ladder. They will only take up space. The people that you want on your ladder are those who are going same direction you are, and that is up. No other direction in life satisfies like ‘up' does.

Let me quickly define success. It is a few simple disciplines practiced every day for rest of your life. Ancient Script gives this definition for success. It is acting wisely in affairs of life and/or handling accurately affairs of life. I cannot leave this without giving you definition for failure. Failure is daily errors in judgment left unattended resulting in chaos and failure. When you fail, and you will, you must attend errors in judgment that caused failure and correct them, otherwise, you will continue to fail until you care not about failure. It will then become part of you and you will have missed life still standing on first rung of your ladder.

Let first few rungs on ladder represent your years of life from birth up to your teen years. Since this is your life you can place yourself on whatever rung of ladder you think you have achieved to and you get to show your own personal growth record. Suppose everything goes really well and you are now approaching adulthood. Life takes on a different meaning. It becomes a struggle as you climb ladder. Prior to this things were not that difficult. You rocked along with not much responsibility and life was a fun game. But now life is no longer a game. You are now a participant in a serious adventure called life. This adventure will include other people and relationships will enter picture. Had there been only one of you and no other people, life would have been a breeze. But others have come to intrude on your adventure and cause complexities. It is called living.

The rungs of your ladder could represent your past accomplishments and successes and perhaps a few errors in judgment called failures which means something less than hoped for. You say, "I didn't bargain for this but here it is. I guess I am going to have to deal with it." Errors in judgment are things that happen when you are out of focus on what is really required for living life successfully. However they must happen in life since that is how we learn. Hopefully we don't go back and repeat same errors. This would be foolhardy and there is nothing to gain from such action. Sadly, too many people do this. They live in same old ruts day after day satisfied that life has dealt them misery and there is nothing they can do about it. They have surrended to failure and failure has them in its grip. The grip is so tight that it chokes any visions of hope and success. They can see no further than failure that lies within them.

Life is a mixture of wins and losses. Don't count just your wins. You did not learn from them. But count your losses and celebrate them as learning times for from them come greatest lessons of life. Continue life. It is going to go on anyway, with or without you so you might just as well enjoy ride. Hopefully your life's ledger will have more assets than liabilities. Remember that no team wins all games. But if you continue to swing every time ball is pitched, you will eventually hit a homer. So don't give up swinging. Practice your swing every day. Who knows when you might just hit one out of ballpark? When you do, don't forget how you did it and continue doing it same way. Some balls are pitched to get you out of game. Some are pitched to see how good you are. Swing at good balls and forget others.

Let's proceed up our ladder. What is our purpose for climbing ladder? Why should we reach out to success? Because it is within us to do so. It was created in us. The Master Creator did not create us as failures but as winners. All we have to do is follow rules given us. It would be sad indeed if at age fifty we looked back and saw that we had barely left first few rungs of ladder. That was where we were when we first started out in life.