Recently, I listened to a sermon by Howard Hendricks. Hendricks taught for sixty years at Dallas Theological Seminary. He died in 2013. In the message, Hendricks described one of his favorite poems, “The Night They Burned Shanghai” by Robert Abrahams. It tells of a couple driving to play Bridge with some of their friends. As they are en route they survey what is going on in the world. The luxury of playing Bridge is juxtaposed with various world tragedies. The poem ends with these arresting lines:
Tonight Shanghai is burning
And we are dying too
What bomb more surely mortal
Than death inside of you
For some men die by shrapnel
And some go down in flames
But most men perish inch by inch
In play at little games.
