The end is near. It has felt that way over the last month, watching the violence of our world exploding onto familiar streets, waking too often to news of death and terror. As these horrific events accumulate, the effect on our souls can be apocalyptic. We ask ourselves, “What is our world coming to? How will we go on?”

Still, even at the most extreme times, I find myself uncomfortable talking about the end. For one thing, it seems like a cop out, when things are bad, to simply fall back on the idea that time is winding up. It avoids the difficult work of finding solutions and moving things forward, not to mention the difficult work of grief and anger. But on an even more basic level, talking about the end just sounds over the top. It’s the language of cult leaders and televangelists. Normal people don’t spend time talking about the end.

But that’s a problem for those, like me, who take scripture seriously, who look to it to learn about life and God. Because in scripture, the end is everywhere! From the prophets, to the gospels, to the epistles, not to mention Revelation, apocalypse is woven through the bible. Among the diverse communities in early Christianity, there is at least one point of agreement: the end is near. They may not know the hour or the day, but they do know it won’t be long.

And that’s hard to swallow for 21^st century people of reasonable intelligence and curiosity. Because, for one thing, they’re wrong. The end wasn’t near, unless by near they meant more than two millennia in the future. Not only did the generation for whom Mark is writing pass away, but so have a hundred others. The end hasn’t come and probably isn’t coming anytime soon. Knowing that, how are we to understand the early church’s insistence on the end?

One possibility would be to understand Christianity as a failed apocalyptic cult, no different from those who believed everything would come crashing down on Y2K or thought that the Mayan calendar meant the year 2012 was our last. The early church believed Jesus would return before they had all died, and he didn’t. End of story and not the end of the world.

But another possibility for understanding the church’s insistence on the end is that the belief that the end is near, more than its reality, is what was important for that community. Maybe there is something about living with the idea of the end that was meant to shape them, and maybe it could even shape and guide us. What might we learn by keeping awake and watching for the end?

One of my favorite books is Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. One of the characters, Lincoln, is an autistic boy who’s obsessed with the false endings sometimes contained in rock songs, those pauses that bands stretch out to leave their listeners on a cliff’s edge of anticipation, wondering if and when the song will resume. Lincoln catalogues such pauses exhaustively. A two-second rest in the middle of The Police’s “Roxanne,” and another in “Long Train Runnin’” by the Doobie Brothers. In a graph he titles, “Relationship of Pause-Length to Haunting Power,” the Four Tops’ monstrous 5-second rest in “Bernadette” comes out near the top.

Lincoln’s father doesn’t understand his son’s obsession and tires quickly of his constant listing. In a moment of exasperation, he pushes the boy about the meaning of these pauses. Why do they matter?! Who cares?! Unable to answer, Lincoln storms away crying, but his mother explains it to her husband this way: “The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.”

Our lives are full of endings, large and small, of rests and interruptions to the normal flow. The death of a family member. The loss of a job. The break-up of a marriage. The launch of an adult child. Or an act of terror. The disruption of our commute by protesters. The death of an idea about ourselves or a way of seeing the world. The end of the summer, the end of the week, the end of a day. Every one is a kind of apocalypse, a universe that ceases to exist in a moment. Like in those rock songs, we balance on the edge of an abyss, a silence that David Whyte says, “is frightening…the graveyard of fixed identities.” In the tension of that ending, we wonder whether life will go on, whether it can. Is this the big one? Is this THE. END. THAT. IS. FOR. REAL?

And most of the time, it isn’t. We realize after a few seconds or a few months that the song has continued. Life goes on.

But if we hold on to the memory of that ending, if we keep in mind the haunting power of the pause, then the life that goes on may be different from the one we were living before. Our experience of the song changes after the false ending. While the end brings fear, it also carries opportunity.

For the early church, the nearness of the end offered a kind of freedom from the expectations of their day. More than at any other time in its history, in those early years the church was known for its love and generosity. Even its enemies talked about how the Jesus movement cared for the poor and stuck to its guns on being peacemakers. I believe it was partially their sense that the end was near that allowed them to live more freely and generously and less selfishly. Rather than anxiously concerning themselves with self-preservation, they were free to give of their wealth and of themselves, knowing that there was no point in holding something back for the moment, soon and very soon, when the music stopped.

For us too, I believe, keeping a sense of the ending before us offers an opportunity to move forward changed. In the haunting power of those pauses, we are invited to reflect, to reconsider, to repent, and reconnect. The false endings that fill our days suggest a question we may be too busy to pose while the band plays on.

What if this were the end? Who would I be today: in my work, in my family, in myself if I knew the song were coming to a close? What would I be sure to say to the people I love? What would I be certain to do with my final days and hours? What if this were the end?

The apocalypse came for my family two years ago April. My dad has lived with diabetes most of his life, and over time it has ravaged his body. He has lost a leg to it, much of his vision, and nearly all of his kidney function. In February 2014, he received a kidney transplant. My mom was the donor. Two months later, I got a call saying that my dad had been found unresponsive on their living room floor, and I booked a ticket up to Indianapolis, fearing the worst.

While I was still in the airport, my sister called to tell me that things were both better and worse than I had thought. Dad was now conscious and expected to recover, but mom was not well. She was acting strange: repeating herself, unable to calm down, but also unable to do anything.

Whether because of the surgery or because of the stress, it turned out she was in the middle of a mental health crisis which would keep her out of work for almost four months and require her to be hospitalized twice. Not only had my sick father nearly died, but my mother, who has hardly been sick a day in her life, the woman who has been a rock for our family, was crumbling. It felt like the end.

Balancing on the edge of that void, dwelling in the depth of that silence, I decided to pause and sought out the help of a great counselor in town. Like many people, I entered into counseling hoping my therapist would give me allthe answers to my problems. I imagined I would lay out the messy realities of my family and all of the challenging and conflicting emotions I was feeling, and he would tell me just what to do.

Which, of course, he didn’t. Instead, he listened closely, reflected back what he heard, and in the place of answers, he gave me a question. It was a simple question, but one I have continued to carry with me. It was just this: What kind of son do you want to be?

I guess technically it’s a question about the present, or maybe about the future. What kind of son do you want to be in this moment, or what kind of son do you wish to become? But I heard it as a question about the end. What kind of son do you want to have been? If this were the end, if I lost my dad, if my mother were never the same, who would I wish to have been to them? What would I hope to have said, or done, or left undone and unsaid? What could I live with if I were the one left living?

And then the music started back up. Gratefully, my parents both bounced back, and we were all relieved and changed. And that question became more important than ever. What kind of son do you want to be? Because now I could do something about it. Now, if I would hold to that memory of the end, I could make a new beginning. And two years later, some days I do, and some days I don’t.

But I do believe, with Jesus, in the power of staying awake, in the importance of his words that remind me that nothing is here to stay. Heaven and earth will pass away, let alone me. And I believe in the vision of the Beloved Community which is meant to take its place, that the end toward which we’re heading is an end of love and peace and mercy, an end to violence and discrimination. It’s coming. But you and I, and even the angels in heaven, don’t know when. Not the day. Nor the hour. None of us knows the moment at which the music of our lives will come to a screeching halt or a closing fade, never to return. Nor do we know how long that pause will last.

But we can face this moment with the memory of all the ends we’ve seen until now. We can remember the haunting power of those silences, the exquisite tension of balancing on the edge of each of those tiny apocalypses: every loved one we’ve said goodbye to, every friend that moved away, every chapter in our lives that came to a close and left us unsure about what came next, every act of brutality and hate that made us wonder if we could go on. We can hold them, and we can ask ourselves: If this were the end, who would I want to have been? How would I hope to have lived? On what will I wish to have spent my time? If this were the end, for me, for you, how would we hope to be known when the music goes on?