Can’t place endwhile in the loop properly in a shortcode

So I spent like 5 hours trying to figure out why my proper-looking code wasn’t giving me the behavior I wanted. Thanks to the fine commentators I was able to get current posts to display without the event_date specified but wasn’t able to fetch posts by date.

I started thinking outside of the box and learned that it was showing ‘todays’ events but the timezone of the server was in a different country so it was tomorrow’s events for me. I specified the default timezone and it works perfectly!

Here’s the shortcode I made to fetch my custom post type ‘event’ according to which ones have the custom field ‘event_date’ value of todays date.

// Add Shortcode
function custom_shortcode() {

date_default_timezone_set("America/New_York");

// find todays date
$today = date("Ymd");


  // args
    $args = array(
        'post_type'     => 'event',
        'meta_key'      => 'event_date',
        'meta_value'    => $today
    );



    // query
    $the_query = new WP_Query( $args );


            // The Loop
            if ( $the_query->have_posts() ) {

                $out .= '<ul>';
                while ( $the_query->have_posts() ) {
                    $the_query->the_post();
                    $out .= "<div>";
                    $out .= get_field('event_name') . "<br>"; 
                    $out .='<img class="myimage" style="max-width:180px;" src=""https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/248228/. get_field("event_image') . '">' ;
                    $out .= " <br>";
                    $out .= '<div class="date">"https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/248228/. get_field("event_date') . "</div>" . "<br>";
                    $out .= '<div class="time">"https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/248228/. get_field("event_time') . "</div>" ;
                    $out .= get_field('buy_ticket_button') . "<br>";
                    $out .= "</div>";

                }

            wp_reset_postdata();
            }

           return $out;

}
add_shortcode( 'todaysevent', 'custom_shortcode' );