Renegade Nun: A Walking Gift of Love

La Mesa prison in Tijuana is home to 6,000 of Mexico’s worst criminals and one eighty-year-old nun, a nun who spends her days praying and counseling hardened murderers, gang leaders, and drug lords. She also fights for their rights. She makes sure they have medicine and clean water. The prisoners love her and call her Mother Antonia. She calls them her sons. The prison warden, Francisco Jiminez, says, “Mother Antonia brings hope to men and women here. And they find hope themselves. She spreads the love of God.” At the end of each day, Mother Antonia doesn’t go home, because for over thirty years she has made a tiny cell in the prison her home.

Before moving into the prison in 1977, Mother Antonia was Mary Brenner Clarke, and she lived in luxurious Beverly Hills. But God transformed her life, which led to a driving compassion for the broken and hurting. She felt that God called her to love the prisoners of La Mesa. And, as Jesus showed us, love shows up in person. Love reaches out. Love moves in. So that’s exactly what Mary Brenner Clark did.

Mother Antonia’s presence led to a dramatic transformation in the prison, but still it was a dangerous place. At one point a riot broke out when she wasn’t there. Eighty-two-year-old Mother Antonia returned to the prison that night to discover that soldiers were surrounding it, doing their best to contain the violence. The prisoners had taken hostages, fires had broken out, and bullets were flying. Mother Antonia told the police, “Let me go in, I know I can do something to stop the violence.” They refused her request, explaining that they feared for her safety. “I’m not afraid,” she told them. “When you love, you don’t have anything to be afraid of. Love casts out fear, the Bible tells us, and I love the men there. . . . I can go into the cells and see the men, pray for them, bring them hope. . . . That doesn’t mean I’m in accord with them. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to show them what’s wrong... It just doesn’t stop me from loving them.” They gave her permission.

Mother Antonia walked into the dark prison and found an influential inmate named Blackie. She told him, “It’s not right that you’re locked up here, hungry and thirsty. We can take care of those things, but this isn’t the way to do it. I will help you make it better. But first you have to give me the guns. I beg you to put down your weapons.”

Blackie told her, “Mother, as soon as we heard your voice we dropped the guns out of the window.”

A pastor said of Mother Antonia, “She’s a walking gift of love.”

I think that’s what you and I are supposed to be. God means for us to be walking gifts of love.

That life is available, and it’s a very real possibility for you. I invite you to explore how God can give you this kind of life in my new book, Renegade: Your Faith Isn’t Meant To Be Safe. Renegades go against the norm and beyond normal. They focus everyday on allowing God to pour into them, and then they find God pouring out. Their lives of intimacy with God lead to influence in the world. They’re done with playing it safe, so they overcome their fear and play it dangerous.

Isn’t that what you long for? To break out of normal and become a walking gift of love?

So, question: Are you a renegade?

Vince Antonucci was the founding Pastor of Forefront Church in Virginia Beach, Virginia, a church where 70% of the people who attend were previously unchurched non-Christians. Vince recently moved to Las Vegas where he started a new church, Verve, in the heart of Sin City, just off the Vegas Strip. Vince is the author of I Became a Christian and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt (2008), and Guerrilla Lovers (2010), and Renegade (2013).