by Brad Layland, Chief Executive Officer & Senior Consultant
“Babylon’s warriors have stopped fighting; they remain in their strongholds. Their strength is exhausted; they have become weaklings. Her dwellings are set on fire; the bars of her gates are broken. One courier follows another and messenger follows messenger to announce to the king of Babylon that his entire city is captured.” Jeremiah 51:30-31 (NIV)
This passage spoke to me this week. Babylon’s warriors were once the strongest, the fiercest, the ones everyone feared. And yet Jeremiah describes them here as hiding in their strongholds, their courage drained, their city burning. They gave up. They stopped fighting.
A few weeks ago, I had hernia surgery. Honestly, it was one of the most painful experiences I can remember. Following surgery, I didn’t want to stay in bed, but I sure wanted to stay still. Every movement felt like fire. One vivid moment was the first time I walked from my house to the mailbox. Normally, that walk would be an insignificant accomplishment, but following the surgery, it felt like running two marathons—or another Ironman. But I did it anyway. And the miraculous thing was that by pushing through the pain, my body healed quickly. It was in moving that I found healing.
That’s exactly what came to mind reading this passage. Babylon fell because its warriors chose to retreat. But sometimes healing, progress, and breakthroughs only come when we take that painful step forward.
This connection is particularly relevant to the work we do with ministries and nonprofits at The FOCUS Group. Fundraising is hard work. It requires courage to step out of our comfort zones—our strongholds—and sit across from a donor, share the vision, and invite them into partnership. It’s so much easier to retreat into the safe option: sending out one more mass appeal letter to everybody instead of doing the harder, slower, more genuine work of building real relationships. But if we stay there, our strength fails. The mission suffers.
I’ve seen it again and again: the ministries that push through the discomfort, that have the hard conversations, that do the disciplined work of connecting with people personally—they’re the ones that experience God’s provision in miraculous ways. Just like my body healed faster when I pushed through pain, these organizations find growth and impact when they lean into the work God has called them to do, even when it feels hard.
So here’s the question this verse leaves me with: where am I tempted to retreat into a stronghold, and what step of faith is God inviting me to take instead?
For me, in surgery recovery, it was the simple act of walking to the mailbox when everything in me wanted to sit still. For ministries, it might be as simple as picking up the phone and scheduling that donor meeting you’ve been putting off.
Either way, the principle holds true: healing, growth, and God’s provision often meet us on the other side of the hard step forward.
We’ve been privileged to help many organizations be more effective in their fundraising by learning and implementing relational fundraising principles in their work with donors. Want to talk?