I have to confess something. As mentioned last week, my wife and I are currently out of the country on a vacation. Our kids are at home with their grandparents. And we made them promise three things to us while we were gone:

1. Be nice and polite and loving to each other while we’re gone.

2. Be nice and obedient and loving to Grammie and Granddad while we’re gone.

3. Under no circumstances — not if your grandparents offer, not if your friends invite you, and not even if Troy and Gabriella actually show up at your door offering to sing and dance in the backyard — are you to go see the theatrical release of High School Musical 3 without us.

High School Musical 3 opens today nationwide.

Because we have been looking forward to it ever since everyone jumped into the pool at the end of HSM2. We’re all in this together, kids — even if Mom and Dad are somewhere in the eastern Caribbean — so you’d better save your long-awaited viewing until we get home.

The British Humanist Association is raising money to launch a new ad campaign on London’s familiar red city buses, and it’s the first of its kind: an ad campaign for atheists. The campaign signage would read, in crisp, happy colors, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

In a short amount of time, the campaign has raised far more money than they expected, and they say the ads may start appearing in January. Christian groups will probably get offended by this and boycott the buses — because who wants to ride on the atheist bus? Not me! It’s a bus-ride to apostasy! — but it would probably behoove us to calm down, stop worrying about it, and, well, enjoy life. Religious groups have used London buses to advertise themselves, but do you know any Londoners who turned to Jesus because of a bus ad? I don’t. And we probably won’t know anyone who abandoned their faith because an evil bus told them to.

Now, if they stepped off a curb on the way to church and were hit by an atheist bus it might be another story…

And let’s not jump to conclusions anyway by calling them “atheist ads” or “atheist buses.” The language in the ad says there is probably no God. That’s a qualifier. That means the voice behind the statement is leaving open the small possibility, however tiny, that there might in fact be a God — it’s just that the material evidence suggests otherwise. According to the signage, God’s existence may be doubtful, or uncertain, but it’s up for debate. That’s a lot softer than pure atheism. This means the buses are agnostic.

You heard it from me: It is permissible for Christians to ride an agnostic bus, as long as you are wearing a Christian t-shirt, cross yourself upon entering, and stay on the lookout for witnessing opportunities.

I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer lately, mainly because I just finished writing a chapter about prayer in my “doubt” manuscript for Zondervan.

Mainly it’s about my problems with prayer — including:

1. How I don’t understand it very well (but am learning to re-understand it)

2. How my attitude about it is wrong because I get increasingly annoyed by the way I pray in public (mainly worrying about what people think about my prayer)

3. How I also get annoyed by the way other people pray in public (mainly worrying about how many times they say the fake humble word “just” — too many — and how often they use some variant of Father, Lord, God, LordGod, or FatherGod in place of commas and periods, as if we need to keep calling God by name every few phrases to make sure we keep his attention)

4. How my tendency to judge other people’s prayers pretty much makes me a horrible person.

The chapter explains how rarely I pray these days using the good-old Southern Baptist, conversational, make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach to prayer. Instead, when I do pray — which, admittedly, isn’t often enough — I find myself relying on selections from the Book of Common Prayer or to the Lord’s Prayer or to other prayers from scripture.

But mainly I return, all the time, to two sentence-long prayers that are easy to remember, are almost always truthful, and are almost always appropriate.

One is known in Orthodox and contemplative circles as “The Jesus Prayer.” There are several variations of it, but the one I like most is:

The other is one I learned from my parents and teachers over the years, who just wanted me to be polite but ended up teaching me the importance of gratitude. That prayer is this:

———–

That’s my confession. How do you pray?