This is a working draft — a root that may grow into a full branch of the garden. Offered as a standalone exploration of what it means to be planted, and why every man needs a man. Gary will integrate it more fully in time.
"Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up... A threefold cord is not quickly broken." — Ecclesiastes 4:9–10, 12
The Plant on the Wall
There is a Starbucks in DuPont, Washington. I used to sit in it with a group of men — older than me, most of them, men who had been meeting together for fifteen years before I walked in the door. And on the wall of that Starbucks there was a photograph, framed in wood, mounted where you could not miss it.
A coffee plant. Roots fully exposed. Held in a hand — not planted, not potted, just held — green and alive and full of leaf above the fist, trailing long pale roots below it, dangling in open air. A plant that belonged in ground, that was made for ground, that was built to send those roots somewhere deep and draw from what it found there.
Not yet planted.
I looked at that photograph a lot in those early months. I did not know yet what it was saying to me. I know now.
Get Local
I had attended the same congregation for more than twenty years. It was across town — a thirty-minute drive, longer in traffic, which in Washington state means longer most days. It had been home. The kind of home you stay in past the season it was built for, because leaving feels like loss and loss is something you learn to defer.
But I heard something in that season, quiet and clear: get local.
The congregation was thirty minutes away. These men were walking distance. In Washington you do not walk much — rain — but the distance was walkable. The church they attended was close enough that on a dry morning I could have made it on foot. That proximity was not incidental. It was the point. God was not just saying find men. He was saying find men near you. Stop driving past your neighborhood to get to your people.
I started attending the Bible study. Eight men, roughly, with a history that went back fifteen years before me. One of them a retired Army chaplain — a man who would become my pastor after I eventually left the congregation I had been in, and who still leads a huddle that meets in my back room when I am in Washington and on Zoom when the group has scattered to other parts of the country. Men in a huddle. Men with a long cord between them.
I walked in as the new man, roots dangling, and they made room in the ground.
What Kemp Sees
Jeff Kemp — son of Jack Kemp, former NFL quarterback, a man who has spent his post-football years thinking carefully about what men need — wrote a book called Receive: The Way of Jesus for Men. Alongside it he has built something he calls the Men's Huddle, and the framework underneath it is worth sitting with.
Kemp is not simply saying get in a group. Most men have heard that and most men have a group that does not actually function as one — a collection of acquaintances who meet weekly and stay safely on the surface of each other's lives. What Kemp is after is something he calls Level 5 Friendship, and the progression toward it is the point. The lower levels are real but insufficient: acquaintances, associates, companions, close friends — and then the fifth level, the one that is rare and costly and irreplaceable: brothers. Men who have your back in the actual dark, who know what you are actually carrying, who want your best even when your best requires them to say something you do not want to hear.
A recent survey Kemp cites found that seventy-six percent of men do not have a close and trusted friend they can share anything with, on any topic. That number sounds too high. It is not too high. I know too many men who lead organizations, who preach to congregations, who make decisions that affect other people's lives — men who, if you asked them honestly, could tell you who they are pouring into but could not name a single man who is speaking into them. The cord runs one direction. There is no one holding the other end.
Proverbs names what fills the gap: Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment. Isolation is not neutral. It is not just loneliness. It is a posture that curves the man inward, that makes his own perspective the only perspective, that removes the friction that keeps a life honest. God said of Adam — created perfect, not yet fallen — it is not good for man to be alone. If man in perfection needed a friend, how much more do we?
The Trotman Question and Why I Changed It
Dawson Trotman founded the Navigators on a question. He was known for asking the men around him — sometimes to their discomfort, always to their growth — where is your man? He meant: where are you in the process of making disciples who make disciples? The question assumed the work was underway and pressed on location, on progress, on the chain of intentional investment that he believed was the shape of the Great Commission lived out in actual relationships.
It is a good question. I have carried a version of it for years. But I have changed one word.
Not where is your man. Who is your man.
The change matters because the honest state of many men — even men in ministry, even men in leadership, even men who can rattle off the names of those they are discipling — is that no one is discipling them. The where assumes a process underway. The who asks something more foundational. It starts at the beginning. It does not assume. It asks whether the cord exists at all.
Who is pouring into you? Who has permission to speak? Who knows enough of your actual life to say something that costs them something? Who is your man?
The group of men in DuPont — the ones who had been meeting for fifteen years before I arrived, the ones with the long cord between them — became the answer to that question for me. I did not pour into them first. They poured into me. The retired chaplain who became my pastor. The men who are still on the Zoom call when I am in Arizona and they are in Washington. Men who knew me before I knew myself in that season and who held what they knew carefully, with patience, at the pace of being known.
That is Tier 3 in the model I work from — Body Life, the household, the community doing its proper work. And it is L7 in the Eight-Layer framework: the five core needs that Koch describes, and belonging foremost among them in a season when belonging was exactly what I did not have. A man with no huddle is a man whose belonging need is being met by something that cannot hold it — performance, position, the approval of people who do not actually know him.
The plant on the Starbucks wall was alive. Green. Full of leaf. Capable of fruit. But roots exposed, held in a fist, dangling in open air.
Alive is not the same as planted.
What Planted Looks Like
I want to be careful here about what I am and am not saying. A huddle is not the Vine. The men in DuPont were not my source — they were the soil. There is a difference, and it is not a small one. The roots go into the ground, but what the roots are drawing from is water that the ground itself does not produce. Jeremiah names it: Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green.
The men around you create conditions for the roots to go somewhere. They dig around you. They are honest with you. They stay when staying is inconvenient. They make the soil workable. But the water beneath the soil is not them. The water is the Lord. A huddle that replaces the Vine rather than directing you toward it is not a Level 5 friendship — it is a substitute, which is a different thing entirely.
What Kemp is building toward, and what those men in DuPont embodied, is community that holds you accountable to the Vine. Brotherhood that makes the Way of Jesus not just a teaching but a shared practice. The huddle is not the destination. It is the condition in which the destination becomes reachable.
Jesus gathered twelve. He poured deepest into three. He was never alone in the sense of being unaccountable, unaccompanied, unseen. The Son of God in human flesh modeled the very thing he wired us for. If that is not an argument for the huddle, I do not know what is.
The Invitation
The coffee plant on the wall of that Starbucks is still there, as far as I know. I am not in Washington as often as I once was. But the image has stayed with me — rooted in me, you might say — because it named something I needed named at a moment when I did not yet have words for it.
You may be that plant right now. Alive. Capable. Full of leaf. But held in open air, roots trailing, not yet in ground. You may be leading, pouring out, functioning at a level that looks like flourishing to everyone who only sees the green above the fist. And underneath — exposed. Unplanted. Drawing from nothing, or from something too thin to sustain what is being asked of you.
The question is not whether you are alive. The question is whether you are planted.
And the question underneath that one — the one that sticks, the one that does not wipe off — is this:
Who is your man?
Who is speaking into you? Who has permission to see the roots? Who knows enough of your actual life to hold the other end of the cord when the weight comes? If you can answer that question quickly and honestly, something is right. If you hesitate — if you realize as you sit with it that the cord runs one direction, that you are pouring out with no one pouring in — then this is the moment to stop deferring that. Not tomorrow. Now.
Get local. Find men. Let them make room in the ground.
And beneath all of it — beneath the huddle, beneath the friendship levels, beneath the cord and the brotherhood and the men who stayed — there is a question that does not belong to me or to Trotman or to Kemp. It rises from somewhere deeper than any of us. It is the question of the One who made you for community because he himself is community, who planted the first man in a garden and said it is not good to be alone, who gathered twelve and went deep with three and prayed for all of us to be one as he and the Father are one.
Have you received the Messiah?
Not as a transaction filed away. Not as a box checked at an altar. As John saw it: to those who received him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — born not of blood, nor of human will, but of God. (John 1:12–13) And as Paul took it further: as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him — rooted and built up in him, established in the faith, just as you were taught, overflowing with gratitude. (Colossians 2:6–7)
Rooted. Built up. Established. Overflowing.
The huddle is where that walk gets lived in company. The men around you are how the Vine tends the branches. The cord between brothers is one of the ways the water gets to the roots.
Get in the ground. Find your man. Let the roots go where they were made to go.
The garden is still growing.
Gary Springer
March 2026
grounded in Scripture, informed by neuroscience, offered freely