Do you know what my favourite day is? It's tomorrow. I don't mean Monday, I mean tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm going to get up early. Tomorrow I'm going to work very hard all day. I'm going to be so good tempered tomorrow and so kind to everybody. Is that how you feel too?

But you know, Jesus kept on telling his friends not to worry about tomorrow. He wants us to make the best of today. He wants us to start being kind and cheerful and brave today. He wants us to give up our bad habits, our meanness and selfishness today. He wants us to give him our obedience and our service, our love and our loyalty, and to give them today.

For of course, there is only one great trouble about tomorrow. It never really comes. It is always in front of us. So let's make today our favourite day. Let's begin afresh with Jesus today.

There is one more thought I would like to share with you which comes out of personal experience.

"There is no tomorrow, only today" these words have stayed with me for more than 26 years, because they were the last words that young William Crothers said to his granny with the prescient wisdom of youth on 14th July 1972. A promising young footballer, he had just left school two weeks earlier and started work in the Parcels Office of the Ulsterbus Depot in Oxford Street Belfast, where he had to work a lying week. So on 14th July he received his first pay packet, which he brought home to his mother unopened. He was so proud that day.

It was the only pay packet that William ever received. The following Friday 21st July 1972 he was murdered by the IRA, one of nine victims who died along with 130 injured on ‘Bloody Friday’ when 20 bombs exploded across Belfast in the space of an hour and a quarter.

Another victim that day was Stephen Parker aged 14, the son of Revd. Joseph Parker of the Missions to Seamen. Stephen died while trying to warn others of the danger that a car parked near a shop where he was working on the Cavehill Road might be a bomb, when it went off and he was killed.

As we approach the third anniversary of the Omagh Bomb this week, in the name of all 3637 and more victims of violence over the past 30 years, let us urge our local political parties to continue to work to find a way of resolving their differences on the outstanding issues, including that of puting paramilitary arms permanently and verifably beyond use. This is something that needs to be done - not tomorrow but today.

Prayer 306 CRCL vol.4.

Heavenly Father, take us now, prepare us to live in readiness to walk in your ways.

To live today equipped for your tomorrow.

Take our gifts and talents, and help us to live by that faith

Which is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. Amen.