Dear Friends, 

The support coming in for Elisha’s Riddle has been astounding. Recently, a dear friend of Elisha’s Riddle offered a very generous gift to help build the ministry. A few others have spontaneously made some donations over the past year, and God has been showing me that he is preparing the way for something bigger. These gifts will not only help strengthen our website and deal with some back-end technical struggles, but they will help water the seeds of vision God planted in this ministry a long time ago (we launched this thing 10 years ago in 2016!).

One thing we are looking at changing is moving from a subscription model to something more donation-based. This will obviously make Elisha’s Riddle more accessible; however, the donations will be focused on something specific the Father has been impressing on my heart in recent months. It has to do with something I’m sensing to call The Field of Dreams. (For those familiar with the movie, there’s an obvious connection to the image from the cover story this month.)

The Field of Dreams is about the Father’s dream—something Jesus tapped into when he looked out at the harvest fields and said “the harvest is ripe but the laborers are few.” The dream(s) are sons and daughters awakening to the good news of grace and finding true freedom in Christ.

Corresponding to that, the dream is to equip believers—laborers—to go out and bring the message in their own unique voice and gifting. We want to see this in our own spheres of influence, but also with our relationships in the 10/40 window—a region of the world that is the most desperate for the Great News of Jesus. 

The details of this vision are still coming together; but I will share that I continue to feel led to offer something special for those who enter into some degree of ongoing financial support. But this would not be so much a way to garner more donations, but rather a deep part of a strategy we feel the Lord has given us. 

Some of you know we’ve had a long-standing vision of providing serialized books to subscribers—where you get a new chapter each month of something that will eventually be a published work through Eyes Open Press. This could also be done with video courses and curriculum, which would come together month by month in this serialized form. This will eventually build a whole catalogue of reformative resources that will help shift the conversation in the Body of Christ. 

In that regard, Elisha’s Riddle Magazine could possibly pivot to an exclusive monthly release of different works in the making. It would be a platform for myself and other authors/creators to piece together a project in a unique and focused way. This provides a helpful bit of accountability to get these beautiful creations into motion. When you know a new chapter needs to be sent to the editor by a certain time, it motivates you. And when you know people will be reading/watching it, that motivates even more!

This model also provides a focused feedback system and streamlines the editing process. There’s a lot of benefits to it, and all of it builds toward us providing a way to help people release the message inside of them. Our subscribers/partners are then more than readers, but co-laborers in this Gospel of Grace.  

With that, we want to provide a stream of articles, excerpts, videos, and miscellaneous resources all for free. We also want to bring back the Elisha’s Riddle Podcast (which would be great to have some authors and creators come on as guests).

None of this, however, can move forward until we finalize the written version of the Awake | Arise | Advance material. This is at the core of our vision as it helps people embrace the finished work message, as well as integrate into their life via the communion table. This is at the heart of what we believe the Lord is igniting in the church in this season. 

The videos are done and while we have a small discussion guide online, we want to have something more substantial that people can use in small groups and one-on-one settings. Since this is so central to our ministry, I will be focusing on this for the first quarter of the year. Therefore, the February and March issues will be very light. We will also be moving toward website updates during this time, so if you don’t hear from me as much, that’s the reason. 

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading! I’ll close this by asking if you would do me a BIG favor and please pause and pray for us right now—that God would give us wisdom and guidance here. The dream is big, and our responsibilities are quite varied, and we want to move forward with grace and rest. I would so appreciate that.

Many, many blessings to you,

Nick Padovani