“God is bringing the culmination of history in our lifetime,” he says. “I’ve told my children that I don’t believe they will see a full life, like I have. They are going to see the return of Christ.”
Time is short: “I’m trying to make every moment count.”
Israel has taken prominence in Ridgeway’s business mix. “I’m in love with Israel,” he says frequently. “I always have been.” The coming year will feature at least two Israel-based projects. In one, Ridgeway is helping plan a year-long series of events, held mostly in the United States, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel.
In the other, Ridgeway will journey to the Middle East sometime next March to recreate the Exodus, in which Moses led more than a million Jews out of Egyptian slavery and back into Israel. His client will be Minneapolis filmmaker Tim Mahoney, for whom the event will coincide with the premier of The Exodus Conspiracy, his documentary that defends the historic authenticity of the Exodus story and reinforces the idea of the covenant between God and Israel.
Ridgeway’s rendering of the Exodus will involve 12 teams of 12 individuals each, representing the 12 tribes of Israel. In the course of several days, they will march 150 miles, beginning in the resort town of Eliat on the southernmost tip of Israel and finishing in Jerusalem at the Knesset.
Last spring, participants in the project gathered from as far away as Sweden in Ridgeway’s conference room. At the time, they were looking to hold the event in Texas (they’d been referring to it as the “Texodus”). But this meeting changed their minds.
The film’s producers and other backers prayed for the project. Ridgeway read from an article by Joel Rosenberg, a best-selling messianic author, about the spiritual significance of Israel.
“He had tears in eyes,” says Pete Windahl, an executive with Mahoney Media, the production company that’s making the documentary.
“This march needs to be in Israel,” Ridgeway told the room.
At that moment, Windahl recalls, the air pressure in the room changed dramatically. “It was a Holy Spirit blowout,” he says. “It just about knocked everybody off their chairs. No one in that room had ever experienced that strong a presence of God.”
They were silent for half an hour. During that time, Craig Nelson, a minister at the Church of the Resurrection in Brooklyn Park and a newcomer to the project, sat, eyes closed, making a sketch on the tablet in front of him of what he was seeing: an angel and someone who could see prophetically.
He drew a horizontal whirlwind with a dark mass at its center. “I knew it was holy,” he says. “I can’t tell you how I knew it was holy, but I knew.”
Then, he saw an angel standing in front of the room. “My body went electric, like if you’ve ever licked a nine-volt battery.”
His conclusion? Ridgeway has a partner: “God is all over this project.”
