Back in the old days, meaning before Computer Assisted Design (CAD), blueprints for a house were drawn on paper with a T-square, triangles, and a real pencil. A carpenter friend of mine used those tools to painstakingly draw each house before he built it. He'd have every wall, joint, and joist drawn in such a way that any carpenter could take those plans and build the house. Of course, he didn't draw it for others but for himself, and, as he said, when he'd finished drawing the plans, the house was half built. He'd thought through every step. The basics were laid down not just on paper, but also in his mind. You could consider the actual building of the house as the easy conclusion of the planning, the simple and almost automatic half of the building process.

Paul writes to the Christian…