A Call for Help!

The hospital where Al had his ankle surgery last December was really high tech.  It was located in the Silicon Valley where many recent technological advances have been made.  One interesting innovation in the hospital was that each staff member wore a type of phone around his or her neck which did not have to be dialed, but which worked by voice recognition. The staff member would speak into the phone, saying the name of another person in the hospital. Most of the time, the voice recognition feature worked and someone would respond within seconds. It was hands-free and very unique.

Amazingly, little robots were used to carry orders from one nurses’ station to another. They could go to any floor in the large facility and even use the elevators. Sometimes little balloons were attached to them...very cute! Al could hear their whirring sounds as they came down the hallway and turned the corner, passing by his room.

“Quick, go take a movie,” he said one morning when he heard a robot approaching his room. I grabbed the cell phone and raced down the hall so that I could get ahead of the little gadget. It approached me with red and green lights blinking, looking like a rolling metal file box on wheels.

The robot automatically opened the heavy double doors leading out of the unit and rolled towards the next nurses’ station, as the doors closed behind it. I got a great movie to share with people from our neck of the woods. Robots in the hospital? Wow!

One day I was coming out of the elevator on Al’s floor, when I noticed a robot stopped in front of closed doors.

“Open doors for Tuck,” it said in a monotone voice.

I stayed to see what would happen. The robot kept repeating the same message over and over… “Open doors for Tuck, open doors for Tuck!” For some reason the signal had failed and the automatic doors weren’t responding.

 When a nurse came by, I told her that poor Tuck was stuck! She said that it happened occasionally; then she opened the doors manually and gave Tuck a shove, sending “him” on his way. Too funny!

Having a robot transport things saved time, energy and money. However, like anything mechanical there was a limit to what it could do. I thought it was interesting that someone had thought ahead and had programmed the robot to call for help when in a jam!

It was easy to relate to poor Tuck! There have been many difficult times in my life when the doors in front of me were closed, no matter how hard I tried to open them. When I finally gave up and asked the Lord for help, He either sent me in a different direction or gave me the strength to wait until another opportunity came along.

Unlike a robot, God has given each of us a mind with which to reason and a free will to make choices. Do we have the faith to believe that He will hear us when we call out to Him for help? Why not give it a try?

 “The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth. He fulfills the desires of those who fear him; he hears their cry and saves them.” Psalm 145:18-19 NIV

(Published in the Porterville Recorder 3-8-14)


(Oh, I just learned from the You Tube video posted on 3-16 that his name is TUG! Hah!)