
Story by Carlos Briceño
A routine trip to the veterinarian’s office last summer illustrated my dog’s astounding ability to live in the Sacrament of the Present Moment, which was placed on vivid display after the trip escalated into a potentially life-threatening situation for her.
Baby Girl’s visit was supposed to be routine, part of her annual check-up. The day was sunny and hot, the temperature around 85 degrees. After the 45-minute exam ended, waves of heat greeted me after I opened the car door as I had left the windows closed.
My dog is getting older, so she lacks the springiness necessary to leap into the car. So I did what I always do, I picked her up and deposited her on the front seat— except this time, I made a mistake: I absentmindedly placed my phone and car/house keys on the floor of the passenger side to free my hands to pick her up.
After I closed the door, I knew I had blundered when I heard the car doors click shut—as in, locked shut, with Baby Girl staring at me in the front seat with her big brown eyes. I was confronted with several problems: I didn’t have my phone to call my wife to let her know what had happened; my wife and I have only one car, so she couldn’t drive the car with the spare key to me right away when I did call her; and the inside of the car was really hot.
I ran into the animal hospital and told the receptionist, Lindsey, what had happened as she waited for a customer to finish paying for his visit. The customer showed no concern, so I had to wait several minutes for the transaction to occur. When he left, Lindsey told me she was about to take a break, so she could drive me to my home, where I could pick up the spare key, and then drive me back.
Using Lindsey’s phone, I called my wife. Several times. She didn’t pick up. I didn’t figure she would because, whenever she sees a phone number she doesn’t recognize, she thinks it’s a telemarketer and normally doesn’t answer.
When I arrived home, I told my wife what happened, and then we spent several minutes looking for the spare key. Once it was found, I ran back to the car and headed back to the animal hospital.

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Since 2018 and 2019—the years my wife and daughter were each diagnosed with terminal illnesses—I have carved space in my heart and soul to make room for the present moment. This mindset requires constant effort and attention, an intentional slowing down, a constant batting away of being in auto-pilot mode, and a radical shift in the rhythms of my habits, priorities and prayer life.
To live in the present moment means every second is full of grace. Every breath is a blessing. Every action bursts with meaning that has implications for eternity. Every moment requires me remembering that God exists, a fact that I used to take for granted.
The power of the present moment has nothing to do with me and my efforts to live there, but everything to do with God’s love. St. Augustine writes about the battle we all face in being receptive to receiving God’s love this way:
“…two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God.”
Once he finally opened his heart to receive God’s love, St. Augustine wrote a prayer that describes the kind of burning intensity I am seeking:
“May the flame of Your love burn in my soul. May it burn incessantly on the altar of my heart. May it glow in my innermost being. May it spread its heat into the hidden recesses of my soul, and on the day of my consummation may I appear before You consumed in Your love.”
This prayer can only be prayed, I have learned, by emptying myself of myself—of my pride, my woundedness, my fears, my selfishness, my stubbornness, my self-reliance, all the baggage I carry around that makes me not seek God’s will because I do not trust His love or mercy enough to allow Him to burn and glow inside me, melting away my sins, so that I become what I was created to be: happy and holy and living an abundant life.
“The proud cannot bring themselves to hold out empty hands to God,” Sister Ruth Burrows wrote in her book, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer. “They insist on offering virtues, good works, self- denials, anything in order not to have nothing.”
Those sentences describe how I don’t want to be any more.
Sister Burrows continues: “They want to be beautiful for Him from their own resources, whereas we are beautiful only because God looks on us and makes us beautiful. God cannot give Himself to us unless our hands are empty to receive Him. The deepest reason why so few of us are saints is because we will not let God love us. To be loved means a naked, defenseless surrender to all God is. It means a glad acceptance of our nothingness, a look fixed only on the God who gives, taking no account of the nothing to whom the gift is made.”
To let God love me means seeking His will each moment, a process that allows me to bathe in the peace that comes from faith in a Loving Father, the same peace I used to feel in the back seat of my parent’s car when I was a child, late at night, my dad driving me and my sisters and mom home from a long trip somewhere, the silence and darkness lulling me slowly to sleep, my heart lit by a small candle — a tiny flame that represented peaceful surrender because I trusted my father to get us home safely.
This flame can be understood by another name: faith. I had faith in my father. I knew he loved me. I knew he loved my family. So I knew he would do everything he could to keep us safe.
Father Jean-Pierre de Caussade, in his book, Abandonment to Divine Providence, talks about the faith that comes from trusting in our Heavenly Father.
“[God] brings life out of the shadow of death; therefore, when nature is afraid, faith, which takes everything in a good sense, is full of courage and confidence. To live by faith is to live by joy, confidence, and certainty about all that has to be done or suffered at each moment according to the designs of God. It is in order to animate and to maintain this life of faith that God allows the soul to be plunged into and carried away by the rough waters of so many pains, troubles, difficulties, fatigues and overthrows; for it requires faith to find God in all these things. … In all these, faith finds its food and support. It pierces through all and clings to the hand of God, the giver of life. … The faithful soul should proceed with confidence, taking it all as a veil, or disguise of God, whose immediate presence alarms and at the same time reassures the faculties of the soul. In fact, this great God who consoles the humble gives the soul in the midst of its greatest desolation an interior assurance that it has nothing to fear, provided it allows Him to act and abandons itself entirely to Him.”
This abandonment is precisely what makes living in the present moment so beautiful: because your reliance is fully centered on God’s love. And that Love is enough because it sustains everything and everyone in the universe. And, mercifully, that Love also offers salvation, as St. Paul relates in Romans 5:8: “God proves His love for us in that, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
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From the time I locked Baby Girl in the car until the time I returned amounted to around 15 minutes. I didn’t think my dog would die in that amount of time, but baking in a fur coat, like the golden one she was in, must not have been fun. I imagined her being incredibly scared. During that time frame, not only was I dealing with feeling incredibly dumb for being so absent-minded, but I was also gripped with fear, my heart pounding in rat-tat-tat fashion, like a paddle ball being rapidly struck by a paddle.
When I got out of Lindsey’s car, my dog was sitting in the same position I had left her. She was panting. But her face was serene. There was nothing in her body language that indicated she was scared. She greeted me when I approached the door with the same tail-wagging exuberance she always displays, like this had been a normal day and all was well.
I let out a huge sigh of relief. My dog was ok. Thanks be to God, she was ok.
When we arrived home, Baby Girl drank some water out of her bowl and then promptly went to sleep.

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Later, in prayer, I realized I had witnessed the power of the present moment in action. My dog trusted me. She did not complain about being left in a hot car. She accepted her predicament and just rolled with it. She did not get mad at me when I opened the door. My dog knew I loved her. She knew it would all work out because she trusted in that love.
She was in that zone I now refer to as “genuine spirituality,” a phrase that I came across in Father Wilfrid Stinissen’s book, Into Your Hands, Father: Abandoning Ourselves to the God Who Loves Us:
“There can be so much escapism in our striving for a ‘spiritual life.’ We often flee from the concrete, apparently banal reality that is filled with God’s presence to an artificial existence that corresponds with our own ideas of piety and holiness, but where God is not present. As long as we want to decide for ourselves where we will find God, we need not fear that we shall meet Him! We will only meet ourselves, a touched-up version of ourselves. Genuine spirituality begins when we are prepared to die. Could there be a quicker way to die than to let God form our lives from moment to moment and continually consent to His action?”
Baby Girl showed no fear in that hot car that hot summer day, a clear indication that she was living in the moment, and, whether she realized it or not, she was consenting to whatever God had in store for her. She had died to herself.
What a lesson in trust!
What a lesson in seeing obstacles in life, not with anxiety or anger, but as a means to ride or die with whatever God’s will was allowing in that moment. His will can draw us closer to Him—or not. But, ideally, if we allow it, in drawing us closer to Him, we slowly understand what Jesus knew on the road to Calvary: we either accept our Cross, or we fight it. We either surrender to God and feel peace, knowing His plan is best, or we chase our tails, spinning in an endless maelstrom of uncertainty and unhappiness, which seems to sum up most of life for a lot of panicked people these days.
In trying to live in the present moment, in seeking to surrender to God’s will in a joyful manner, I hungrily seek out reading material that can inspire me to not project into, or be anxious about, the future or be dragged down by the past. In short, I don’t want to fail to live in the present moment like I did that day last summer when I projected all kinds of horrible things in my mind out of guilt and fear for locking Baby Girl in the car.
I want to learn from others who have sought the Divine in the present moment, and this passage, from Thomas à Kempis’ book, The Imitation of Mary, reminded me of how Baby Girl was able to thrive during her front seat-heat time-out:
“Providence does not always liberate the upright from all fear and danger, nor does it always give them in their need the kind of help they want and ask for. But its plans are no less wonderful, whether it releases men from need or leaves them in it, whether it avenges them against injustice or leaves them to be its victims. In affliction, God gives them the grace to be patient, and thereby bestows a greater blessing on them than if He were to overwhelm them with prosperity.”
How many times do we grow in despair or get depressed or angry when life goes off the rails a bit—you lose your job, or you didn’t get the promotion you wanted, or someone you love gets a terrible illness, or you don’t have enough money to do some of the things in life you want to do.
My advice: learn this prayer so that it becomes part of your soul. It’s also from The Imitation of Mary:
“Lord, you bid me travel by paths I do not know. Your command is enough for me. Your will is my light and all the reason I need. Admittedly, I do not know where I am going, but I am sure that, if I let myself be led by a guide as wise as You are, I shall not go astray. …
“We often trust entirely the advice of a man who is regarded as prudent and enlightened. Have we any reason to mistrust when You, eternal Wisdom, are the One who directs us?
“Therefore, however surprising I may find Your plans for me, I shall simply bow down before them in adoration, for Your power surpasses my power to understand it.”
Amen.
