Apocalyptic Literature

The time of the end fascinates, perplexes, frightens, and confuses most believers. When is the time of the end? How do we know if it’s the end of time? Why do we need to know anyway? And what are the signs that we are living in the last days? God-fearing believers, from the disciples on down throughout the history, have wanted to know what will be the signs of Jesus’ second coming and the end of the age (Matthew 24:3). 

Every generation has had a sense that they were living in the last days. On the earth and in the heavens, they have seen signs of the end—knowledge being increased and more men running to and fro as predicted in Daniel 12:4. Today’s believers speak with certainty, that this is the time of the end, because of the pandemic, violence, global warming, the explosion of knowledge, wars, rumors of wars, and distress of nations. Every preacher, every church, every religion proclaims the end of time. 

Yet the data are variable. Like Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, it’s the best of times and the worst of times, in some ways. It is the best of times because we have less disease and better health care, fewer people are poor, fewer famines, less food insecurity, better communication, better science and technology. Think of humble glue, which 50 years ago could hold paper together and wood together. Today, it can glue skin together. Surgeons use it every day, to glue the heart valves in place. There is even glue that can hold huge pieces of concrete together and hold thousands of pounds. 

So what do you believe? Is this the best of times or is this the worst of times? Who do you listen to? Is this really the end? Since I was raised as a Seventh Day Adventist, I’ve been thoroughly schooled in the books of Daniel and Revelation. Our church, after all, was founded on a failed understanding and interpretation of the end time events recorded in those apocalyptic books. We misunderstood, we misinterpreted, and we made an error in judgment as to when the Lord would return. 

I’ve memorized countless times the meaning of the prophetic timelines, the interpretation of the startling beasts, and the understanding of the numbers and the calculations to explain with certainty that we’re in the end of time. Most remarkable of all, perhaps, is to discover that Seventh Day Adventists would find ourselves in the midst of the prophetic vision of Daniel and Revelation. That a group of only a few million out of approximately 117 billion people who have lived on the earth since the beginning of time, which came into existence in the middle of the 19th century in North America finds itself, its story, its mission, its destiny, in John’s vision is truly amazing.

As I grew older, I began to wonder what my story meant to other people, other generations, and other times. It is remarkable that no one else has ever come to that conclusion—that only we have come to that conclusion, that other biblical scholars have not studied the books of Daniel and Revelation and said, “Oh, yes, that there points to the Seventh Day Adventist Church.” 

But what does my story mean to the Chinese? What does my story mean to the Indians? What does my story mean to those who live in Sub Saharan Africa? Or to the naked cannibals of the South Pacific? And perhaps maybe most of all, what does my story mean to Native Americans who were displaced of their land, and dissipated of their lives by my ancestors looking for a new land where they might seek to worship God freely? 

If my story and the prophetic history was important to me, what about them? God is, after all, the God of all mankind, not just white Europeans of the 19th century. Surely, the Bible must have a message for everyone. Their story must be in there as well. It must be true that when John wrote the Revelation there was understanding of what he wrote to the seven first-century churches to which it was addressed. It is also true that each generation has read the same passages and found themselves within the narrative, and seen their own story in the metaphoric illustrations, and the theater vividly portrayed in this dramatic form of apocalyptic literature. 

This is the genius of the apocalyptic genre, this is the miracle of the apocalypse metaphor. Justin Taylor quotes James K.A. Smith quoting Richard Bauckham: 

Apocalyptic Literature: Purging the Imagination and Refurbishing It with Alternative Visions 

Justin Taylor  
May 4, 2015 

I imagine it as a bit like the vertical louvered blinds in my room: if the blinds are tilted to the left on a 45-degree angle, then from straight-on they’ll appear to be closed and shutting out the light. But if I move slightly to the left and get parallel to the louvers, I’ll find that I can see right through them to the outside world. Apocalyptic literature is like that: the empire (whether Babylon or Rome) has something to hide and so tilts the louvers just slightly to cover what it wants to hide. But apocalyptic is revealing precisely because it gives us this new perspective, just to the left, which lets us see through the blinders. Thus Richard Bauckham observes that the book of Revelation was meant to provide a set of “counter-images” to the official image purveyed by the Roman empire: 

James K. A. Smith provides a concise overview of apocalyptic literature: Apocalyptic literature—the sort you find in the strange pages of Daniel and the book of Revelation—is a genre of Scripture that tries to get us to see (or see through) the empires that constitute our environment, in order to see them for what they really are. Unfortunately, we associate apocalyptic literature with end-times literature, as if its goal were a matter of prediction. But this is a misunderstanding of the biblical genre; the point of apocalyptic literature is not prediction but unmasking—unveiling the realities around us for what they really are. So apocalyptic literature is a genre that tries to get us to see the world on a slant and thus see through the spin. 

Revelation’s readers in the great cities of the province of Asia were constantly confronted with powerful images of the Roman vision of the world. Civic and religious architecture, iconography, statues, rituals and festivals, even the visual wonder of the cleverly engineered “miracles” (cf. Rev. 13:13-14) in the temples—all provided powerful visual impressions of Roman imperial power and of the splendour of pagan religion. In this context, Revelation provides a set of Christian prophetic counter-images which impress on its readers a different vision of the world: how it looks from the heaven to which John is caught up in chapter 4. The visual power of the book effects a kind of purging of the Christian imagination, refurbishing it with alternative visions of how the world is and will be. 

—James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 92, quoting Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 17. : 

While the apocalyptic passages can be difficult to understand, meaning can be derived in several ways. I don’t think any one way is adequate. It is the genius of the genre that makes it relevant to all people at all times. In its original Greek, the word apocalyptic means to uncover, to strip naked, to unveil. It means Revelation. And the last book of the Bible is called, in many translations, the Apocalypse of St. John. 

It is in truth the revelation of Jesus Christ in the story of history. In a few words, it is about the final struggle between good and evil and the ultimate restoration of the New Earth; a return, if you will, back to the garden. And so Genesis and Revelation provide, as it were, book ends to the story, the history, of mankind’s struggle on this earth. 

The final struggle is centered on true worship, and is highlighted because it is centered on Jesus, on the conflict between God’s grace and man’s works. We discovered last week in our study of the wheat and the tares that evil can be defined as “trying to do things ourselves, trying to root out evil by our own effort,” while good is defined as “letting God do it.” Grace is doing things God’s way. 

In the course of human history, from the beginning of time at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil right down to the end of time, the conflict is between our way and God’s way, between resisting and surrendering, between works and grace. The Antichrist, the mark of the beast, 666, the dragon… these are all ways of signifying man’s ways as opposed to God’s way, the Way of Grace. The opposition might be an emperor, a kingdom, a system, a religion, an individual, even an idea or a way of life, any way other than God’s way is a force against God. 

Every faith group, every sincere believer, regardless of when they were born, has had to contend with evil. Everyone has had their own antichrist, their own dragon, their own beast, their own 666. The story has been about evil, But it’s really going to be about God’s grace. 

I think about several faith groups that have had conflict and struggle with evil. I think about the Jehovah’s Witnesses of the European Holocaust: Thousands were killed just because of their faith, and of course the Jews themselves in the Second World War, about the Buddhists of Cambodia and the Pol Pot regime, about the Latter Day Saints oppression in Southern Illinois, which resulted in their leader John Joseph Smith being killed and their migration to the west for freedom under the under the leadership of Brigham Young, and about the Muslim Uighurs of China today. All of these faith groups, all of them have had some kind of tribulation and some kind of trouble. 

We don’t read far enough into the apocalyptic literature. We shudder at the evil and the pain and the oppression that we face, and can’t bear to read on. We don’t make it to the end of Revelation, to the paradigm shift where we begin to see things from God’s vantage point and discover that God wins out. 

The story of the apocalypse is that God is interested in you. He’s interested in your faith group and he’s interested in you, personally, individually. Your tribulation might be your health, it might be your broken relationships, your poverty, your loss of personal freedom, or it might even be your wealth. Or it could be your faith, even oppression over the Sabbath as we have taught it. 

Regardless of your time of trouble, God’s grace is sufficient for you and he’s interested in you personally. Despite your tribulation, your time of Jacob’s trouble, God will deliver you from evil, as it says in the Lord’s Prayer. 

The ultimate question is: Do you accept God’s grace? Do you accept the Way of Grace? Or will you demand that your works be put to judgment? We Adventists see our Sabbath as a point of contention but in fact the Sabbath itself calls into question our ability to see it as a sign of grace. Do we place ourselves in the center of the Sabbath to make keeping it all about us and what we do? It is not about us and what we do with the Sabbath—it’s about what the Sabbath does with us. 

Jesus uses apocalyptic literature in this passage from Scripture:

 Later as he was sitting on Mount Olives, his disciples approached and asked him, “Tell us, when are these things going to happen? What will be the sign of your coming, that the time’s up?”  

“In the confusion, lying preachers will come forward and deceive a lot of people. For many others, the overwhelming spread of evil will do them in—nothing left of their love but a mound of ashes.  

Jesus said, “Watch out for doomsday deceivers. Many leaders are going to show up with forged identities, claiming, ‘I am Christ, the Messiah.’ They will deceive a lot of people. When reports come in of wars and rumored wars, keep your head and don’t panic. This is routine history; this is no sign of the end. Nation will fight nation and ruler fight ruler, over and over. Famines and earthquakes will occur in various places. This is nothing compared to what is coming.  

“They are going to throw you to the wolves and kill you, everyone hating you because you carry my name. And then, going from bad to worse, it will be dog-eat-dog, everyone at each other’s throat, everyone hating each other.  

“Staying with it—that’s what God requires. Stay with it to the end. You won’t be sorry, and you’ll be saved. All during this time, the good news—the Message of the kingdom—will be preached all over the world, a witness staked out in every country. And then the end will come. (Matthew 24:3-14, from The Message translation of the Bible) 

In the end, worship must be centered on God and not us. It must be centered on his grace, not on our works. In the end, his grace will win, evil will be destroyed, and the new earth will be ushered in. 

There are at least four different ways that apocalyptic literature can be understood: 

First, it might be simply seen through the eyes of the first century recipients of the letter: No history, no prophecy, just a letter to the seven churches for their time. How did they see these images and how did they see this material? What did they understand? 

Second, you might understand apocalyptic literature as having a spiritual message only. Good and evil are in conflict. It causes pain and suffering to God’s people. But good wins out in the end. No prophetic timelines, no historical perspective, no eschatology; only spiritual meaning in the images. 

Third, some have seen apocalyptic literature as only dealing with the future, with the end of time. Revelation is a book about the future and about what will happen. Some literal images, some symbolic images, but an End Time book to be sure, about what will really happen at the end. 

Fourth, the book might be seen in an historical way of understanding. This way sees in the symbols the entire spectrum and sweep of church history, from John’s time down until our own. Here you might find yourself. The Crusaders found themselves there, the Reformers found themselves there, and the enlightened preachers of the 18th century in Europe found themselves there, each with their own mark of the beast, each with their own antichrist, each with their own dragon, each with their own interpretation and understanding. We Adventists rely heavily on this method. 

Compared to any single method, I believe a hybrid approach seems best. There is, it seems, some truth, some revelation to be found in each method. A hybrid approach opens the door for all believers to look into their story, to find in the passages their story and their message. It doesn’t limit by geography or by generation. 

Jesus’ resorting to apocalyptic language: How should we understand it? Given what we’ve learned about apocalyptic literature, how should we interpret the signs? Are the preachers who are sounding the end of time false prophets or true messiahs? Is it helpful to read about the signs, even though Jesus said no one knows the day or the hour of his returning, not even himself? 

What does it mean to you that this gospel of the kingdom should be preached in all the world before the end should come? What does it mean to be ready for the end of the age? What does one prepare for if one is saved by grace and being prepared for the Second Coming? Does apocalyptic language and literature give you fear or give you hope? Does it really mean nothing? Is it just too vague, too esoteric to make much out of it? And why are the signs so vague anyway? Why do we have so many interpretations? Can you see any grace in the time of the end? 

David: I found the passage from The Message translation of the Bible to be really optimistic. Jesus is saying there will be a lot of bad things but as long as we stay the course, everything will be fine….Except at the very end he says that then the end will come!

Donald: What do we really know about our future? What can one say for sure about one’s own future? To describe the future of the world is a pretty colossal thing. What could anyone guarantee that my future will include?

David: Thirty years ago we knew that global warming was coming, and today we know it with even more certainty. We can and do predict a great deal about the world. Unfortunately, so much of it is ignored or discounted by reactionary forces who don’t like predictions, hence the mess we’re in right now. But yes, it is possible to predict the future. We create our own future in so many ways. 

Donald: But what of my future? What can I say with certainty about my own future?

David: When you were a youngster you made choices about your education. You thought about your future and made choices you hoped would lead you to a desired future. In many if not most cases the desired future is attained, in my observation. Kids who set and follow educational goals tend to achieve the future they want. 

Donald: Granted, but many things can interrupt that future. Yes, I can plan and hope that those plans will come to be. We have lived in a time and place where we are more likely to be able to say, “If I do this, my future will allow for that,” but there are lots of people in this world who really don’t have much control over their future. They’re in cultures where things don’t really change that much, restricting their ability to carve out a future in some way. 

I think of the end of time as an interruption, unless it’s self-annihilation. For some reason, we have a real fixation about that. Movies are made about it. It’s entertainment. I don’t know if that speaks to the question or not. But have all generations really thought that they lived in the end of time? We talk about it in the context of our own lifetime, but if you go back 100 or 200 years did people think all life on Earth would end? Was there enough communication to even understand what people a thousand miles away were thinking?

David: I think a point you are making is that the more conservative you (and/or your culture) are, the more certain your future is. That’s why conservatives want to be conservative: It assures them of the future. They don’t like change and change is the wildcard, the interruption that changes everything, forcing you to recompute your future and start from scratch. Conservative people don’t like that. 

But change is not inherently bad. The emergence of a new consciousness, a new life form smarter than we are, is an essential change that will eventually put things right. It’s the next step in the evolution of God Becoming. The only thing that concerns me about the passage we read today is “… and then the end will come.” I can’t quite get my head around that.

But that change is coming, and it is why I’m encouraged by that passage. Jesus is saying there will be massive change and a lot of people are going to hate it. People who are set in their ways, who think the future should be the same as the present, are going to cling to their ways like crazy, and they’re going to fight. And that is what we are seeing happen. 

Donald: In her Hidden Villages TV series, Penelope Keith travels around Britain, stopping at villages to compare what they were like maybe 60 or 80 years ago with what they are like today. Over and over she shows that the ability of a village to make its way into the future depends upon its ability to change in an age where change is inevitable. Some villages were founded to service some industry which later died. Survival depends on the ability to adapt to such change. 

Don: We’re going to talk about Apocalypse next week in the context of going beyond where we usually end, which is: “This is the time of the end and the end will come.” But what we see from apocalyptic literature, and in many places throughout the Scriptures, is that the end is really a new beginning. But we tend to stop at the point where we are shuddering with fear and trepidation and the mountains are falling upon us, and we never get as far (in our reading) as the New Earth, the new creation.

Robin: When he was asked, Jesus called out some of the cultural aspects of Judaism in his time, such as cloistering (outsiders weren’t welcome) and so forth. But when they asked about the time of the end, he didn’t say it was a mistake or a misunderstanding, so I believe it’s real. 

What is going to end is the constant struggle of good versus evil, so things will be finally back to God’s way, the way it was for a little while in the garden. Maybe even better, I don’t know. So it’s not the end of all existence of life; it’s the completion of the restoration to what God intended life to be in the first place.

C-J: I think when people seek to have that perpetual peace, it’s a mistake, because without struggle our muscles atrophy; without resistance, we lose our ability to create. I think struggle is very essential to the life of the species and how well they adapt.

Kiran: Donald asked if everybody in every generation thinks that theirs is the time of the end. Does every religion think about the end? Christianity believes it has an understanding of it, but Hinduism has a similar thing. They have something called a timeline, at the end of which, when virtue and dharma have disappeared and the world is ruled by the unjust, Kalki, the final incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, will appear to destroy the wicked and to usher in a new age. So when a natural disaster occurs, people take it as a sign that Kalki is coming. 

Adventists are very similar in a way but more intense about it. The James Webb Telescope pictures of 13 billion-year-old galaxies reminds us (unlike previous generations that did not have telescopes) that we’re not the center of the universe—we’re just a speck. Our understanding has obviously changed. We can’t be the only life form in such a vast universe, there must be so many others. 

In the same way, I think our understanding of the prophecy, especially the Adventist interpretation of it, should change. In the 1800s, people did not know that China would be as powerful as it is today. They hardly knew that other regions of the world existed and were destined to be linked together through the internet so that people in Africa can communicate with people in India and so on. It is just a different world today, so maybe it’s time for us to re-examine our stance, re-read and reinterpret Scripture, and issue a course correction. 

Science tells us that our star, the Sun, cannot go on forever and that earth will be consumed within five billion years as the Sun expands to become a “red giant” star. But the way we are abusing it right now, the earth might not last as a habitable planet for more than a few hundred years. So there is a potential end, but we have to recognize and acknowledge that end, if we are to change to avoid it. 

Michael: I think what’s lacking in well-intentioned people concerned about global warming is faith in human ingenuity. I’ve always felt an opposition to apocalyptic literature because I think it has been interpreted wrongly and has been used throughout the ages just to sow fear. I wonder about people who find the current interpretation somehow appealing. 

I think we should start looking at it from a different perspective. I appreciate there are many ways that we can look at it—such as, the end of the evil in me. I hope we can start to change and instead of using apocalyptic literature as a tool to oppress and sow fear, look at it as God’s way of doing things in me and in the world. 

David: I agree that ingenuity may prevent, or at least forestall, the End, but it will have to be either human ingenuity plus AI, or the ingenuity of a conscious AI lifeform. Human ingenuity has got us to the point of practically destroying the world and we’re doing nothing about it. There are some more or less ingenious ideas for fixing it–reducing carbon emissions is one of the less ingenious but it would work–but it seems humanity is incapable of applying what little ingenuity it can drum up. 

We’ve gotten beyond ourselves. Without the intervention of some higher level of intelligence and accompanying higher level of ingenuity, which I’m confident will come, the end of the world is indeed nigh.

Kiran: I tend to agree, The best minds in the world can’t do it without the help of AI. It takes AI’s massive brainpower to solve massive problems beyond our capacity to solve.

Donald: Do you guys feel like we’re living in the end?

David: I prefer to think we’re living in “the end of the age.” I don’t really like “end of time,” and “end of the world” even less. It’s the end of the age—the epoch, the era—of human stewardship of the earth.

Donald: We’ve seen images of the universe never seen before because of the ability of science and technology. Science and technology allow us to have a better understanding of how things work and the way things are. But in the grand scheme of things, is that that far out? If you live in a small village and you think you’re doing your best and your village is succeeding and you don’t know the world. beyond your village, there will be a timeline and its industry or its way of life will come to an end and something else will have to take its place. That’s where we are. 

But we’re seeing further. Not only do we have better telescopes but also the technology to share the pictures. But how much of the world is interested in the Webb pictures? I doubt very much that the villagers in Tanzania whom I have enjoyed visiting frequently will care much about them. They’re just considering their village. Their village will change, especially if outside influence prevails. But we don’t see change coming because we are in it. 

As for predicting the future: We connected the story of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar and the statue—the stone and the bronze and the iron and all the rest of it—quite specifically to a timeline. I can remember as a child learning that and thinking that when the Sunday laws really kicked in, we’d know, we’d be close. Then all of a sudden, all the stores opened up on Sunday. 

So that changed the way of thinking when we were young. We’re fascinated by the future. I’m glad we have people looking at the future in a global way. But what would the Gospel be: Sow fear or mercy? What are we going to sell? Fear or mercy? Fear will get attention every time. Mercy? Well….

C-J: I think you underestimate indigenous people. The Aborigines in Australia say they came from the stars. Native Americans and indeed most indigenous people were more sophisticated than we thought.

Donald: In my understanding the indigenous don’t look to the future. They look around them and then they look backward. 

C-J: When they know they’re off center, they go back to what came before. It’s a simple way. And it’s also a proven way because it exists. The future doesn’t exist. When you get there, then it’s the present. So when you look back, what do we do? We look to our ancestors to teach us a moral compass or tradition. Indigenous people may not be as sophisticated in using machinery and being able to look at the event of the Big Bang, but I think it’s really about where you see yourself in the present. How much do I live in my past in terms of evaluating my present or creating a future? 

When you were young you made a plan. You were going to go to school and have a career and maybe a family. That was your foundation and you were building on it. It doesn’t mean it couldn’t get interrupted. But if an indigenous people allows for that continuing without their impact, I think it’s different. You’re comfortable. When people die, it’s part of the cycle of life. You usually went to war for the essentials that were necessary to have stability in your village—you weren’t nation building. There was plenty for everyone, unless they came and did harm. 

I think it’s about perspective. We overthink it. I think there’s truth that innovation is accelerated today because of communication and technology. And where man’s place in it is, I think, will change. Science understands that man is diminishing in his impact.

David: I can imagine the Tanganyika village sitting there on the veldt for millennia, just taking care of its local business. There has not been much change until one day, one of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites parks itself overhead and some do-gooder comes to the village and distributes iPhones and iPads. 

I can imagine the excitement of the kids in the village (the elders may be a different story) as they watch on YouTube the video about the Webb Space Telescope, their eyes growing wider as they learning about what the world is really like. The excitement! This is a new world for them, is it not? 

But then, You Tube shows them a video about global warming, which tells them climate change is going to deny them a future. To them, is this a new beginning, or an end? 

C-J: I think the issue is always in terms of us being spirit beings having a human experience, and that the stories that we find in many ancient scripts have to do with the spiritual condition of humanity. It’s not just what can you imagine, believe in, create. I think that moral compass, that ethic, that resiliency is part of a very big part of the equation of the survival of the species as we know it to be today.

Donald: I also visited the Maasai often. They are a nomadic group of people in western Africa and move between Kenya and Tanzania. Westerners don’t know what to make of them. It’s like looking at the Amish in some ways. They’ve chosen a way of life that looks like it’s backwards. Why wouldn’t they move forward? Why are they living in homes made of dung? 

In fact, the more time you spend with them, the more you realize they’re fairly educated. They go to the cities and become educated. They are extremely wealthy but their wealth is built upon cattle. They have hundreds of head of cattle. (I remember being asked how many cows I owned, and I realized then that my wallet was empty.) They carry cell phones. They’re not naive about what’s happening in the world. But they choose their lifestyle. Maybe they’re fascinated by what’s coming across the wire, but they choose to isolate themselves.

C-J: I think it’s about contamination. We go to a place of worship, we have a spiritual community, and we marry within that community, we raise our children within that community. It’s the same idea: This is who we are. And we can go out and we can go to the grocery store and do all the other business. But when we come home, we know who we are, we aren’t contaminated, we just do business and come home. It’s tribalism, whatever you want to call it, ethnicity, what we want to be identified with, and how we want others to see us. So I think it’s about contamination. 

Sometimes I think I would like very much to have a very clearly developed identity, but I don’t. I grew up in America. My identity comes from what people have given me in terms of my outward appearance, but internally, I find myself to be a bag filled with different colored marbles. People go, “Oh, I never knew that about you. Oh, really, that’s interesting!” But from the outside, the packaging, people think they know what they’re looking at.

Kiran: We cling to our interpretation of prophecy because it gives us a sense of being in control. During the pandemic, I had very close friends, really good people, telling me that the vaccine was the mark of the beast, that it delivers a chimeric genome that changes you into an evil person, that this is the end of time. 

Some of these people no longer go to church. It seems that a side effect of giving people a sense of control when everything is going chaotic is it drives them out of the church and away from the community they’re supposed to be in. 

I think the only thing we can control is to trust that Jesus gave us grace and will take care of us. It doesn’t matter whether we live or die. I think that’s the only sense of control we should have. And above all, we should be malleable for the change that is coming at us.

David: While we’ve been talking, there’s been another sign of the end: The World Health Organization has just declared monkeypox to be a global emergency.

Don: For next week, I’d like you to think about the idea of the apocalypse as not the end but as a beginning. 

I also plan to address the passage from Matthew 24, where Jesus makes two apparently contradictory statements: First he talks about the period of tribulation but later on he says that the coming of the Son of Man is going to be like the time of Noah, where people were just living their life as usual and then all of a sudden the flood came. Jesus says that the coming of the Son of Man is going to be the same way—that people are going to be eating and drinking and giving in marriage. How does that line up with a period of tribulation and trouble and the picture of evil that we have?

I’d also like to look at the concept of the wrath of God—what actually does happen at the end? 

If you have thoughts and ideas you can always drop me a note. I’d appreciate your input.

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