Actor David McCallum died last month. For the uninitiated, McCallum played Russian Illya Kuryakin, a secret agent in the TV show, “Man from U.N.C.L.E.” Illya was sidekick to Secret Agent Napoleon Solo, and together these two good guys outwitted the evil agents from THRUSH.

McCallum’s death transported me back to Miss Miller’s fifth-grade classroom, where a small group of friends and I re-enacted this popular 1960’s TV show. Susan, Becky and I were the good guys from U.N.C.L.E. (eventually there was a spinoff, “The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.,” but we were trending at the time.) Kurt and Richard were the bad guys with THRUSH. We played mainly at recess, and occasionally in the classroom, using ball point pens to shoot messages across the room to each other or tapping out code on the desk.

Like Solo and Kuryakin, we always outwitted THRUSH, making the world a safer place. As a fifth-grader also enamored with Emma Peel (Diana Rigg in “The Avengers”) and Nancy Drew, I was thoroughly convinced that collectively, we could save the world and make it a safer place. It was an interesting twist of the Cold War days that the television writers had a Russian and an American working together to vanquish the real bad guys.

One would think that by now, I’ve put away these childish things, but rest assured, my inner Kuryakin-Peel-Drew is alive and well. And given all the conflicts and wars and persecutions going on in the world today, the desire to make things right is stronger than ever.

On many levels making the world a safe place is a proper instinct. We work hard to create (or re-create) safe places to live, to work, to attend school, to worship, to be accepted and respected. We don’t want outsiders to intrude, and if they do, we’ll fight like my childhood heroes to beat them back.

The problem with self-made safe spaces is the intruders still get in. Some might chip away at the foundations of our safe places till we feel like giving up. While other intruders creep in with the darkness of disease, unemployment, divorce, wayward loved ones, failure, dementia, rejection, reminding us that our safe places aren’t safe after all.

The end of our manufactured safe places isn’t a call to despair and moan about how awful things are, rather it’s a call to hope and gladness. A call to hope in the Lord’s steadfast love, in his faithfulness, his deliverance, a call for gladness “because we trust in his holy name” writes the psalmist in Psalms 33:21.

And that goal to save the world has its fatal flaw—we can’t save ourselves, let alone the world. As the psalmist wrote earlier in Psalm 33: “The king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength. The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue.” (vv. 16, 17)

That’s very good news for you and me because the burden to save us was placed on another’s back, scarred and wounded as it was for our salvation, and not only ours but also the whole world.

We can still be about making the world a safe place and saving it as we point intruders to Jesus, the only hope for rescue and rest. and as we witness global tragedies, even as we seek proper responses we can fall before God in prayer and plead with him to work in ways we cannot apart from him.