From the projects to prosperity
A Bethel University custodian’s past demonstrates God’s redeeming love and provision.
By Abby Chalmers
Barbara Josephs huddled next to her best friends, Teresa Garcia and Patty Carlson, within the playground fort near her house in the St. Paul housing projects neighborhood. Between them sat two wine bottles, one Mad Dog 2020 and the other Strawberry Hill. With an hour until 6 a.m. volleyball practice at Roosevelt Junior High School, the three 14-year-olds shared one mission–to get hammered.
And they did. Josephs dragged herself to the early-morning practice completely “smashed” on liquor and reaped the consequences of her actions. The Roosevelt administration had finally had enough of her shenanigans, and Josephs found herself kicked out of the school.
Fifty years later, Josephs is back at school as a Bethel University electrician and Facilities Management building custodian and with a plethora of life stories to share with the students who stop to talk to her in the hallways.
Born into a family with nine other siblings, Josephs had the odds stacked against her from the beginning. Two of her brothers died before she was old enough to know them, one passing as a baby and the other killed from a police gunshot to the back of the neck after stealing and driving a car down an alleyway.
When Josephs was 18 months old, her mother, Margaret, left the man that she claimed was Josephs’ father, though Josephs could never be sure of that. Of her siblings, she’s the only one with straight hair and green eyes as everyone else has dark, curly hair and blue eyes.
Margaret raised Josephs and her siblings on her own in a brand-new, five-bedroom house on East Congress Street in the Westside neighborhood. Though the family was “extremely poor,” Margaret worked long hours yet always made sure that their home was clean and inviting, a refuge for anyone who needed a hot, food-stamps-sponsored meal.
Despite her mother’s best efforts to keep her safe and healthy, Josephs experienced sexual abuse from age four onward at the hands of several men in her life, including a neighbor, the priest who blessed Margaret before her death in 1987 and the uncle who lived with her family for a number of years.
Josephs turned to substances.
“At a very early age, I was smoking pot,” she said. “Sixth grade, fifth grade maybe even, and taking these little pink pills that were really like speed. I did everything.”
The wine-and-volleyball incident put Josephs in hot water as the school administration yearned to expel her. But Josephs’ junior high physical education teacher, Phyllis Baltus, saw something in her that no one else could, and she railed against the administration, trying to get them to let Josephs stay.
“I certainly wasn’t afraid to tell her about what she needed. She needed Jesus. She just was starved.” — Phyllis Baltus, Josephs’ physical education teacher
“I would say to the principal, ‘What’s the point in sending her to another school?’” Baltus said. “‘We know her problems. She lives next door to us.’”
Not only did Baltus stick up for Josephs within her junior high school, but she also repeatedly told Josephs the truths that she so desperately needed to hear.
“I certainly wasn’t afraid to tell her about what she needed,” Baltus said. “She needed Jesus. She just was starved.”
Josephs would hear her out.
“She always told me how much Jesus loves me,” Josephs said. “[She’d say], ‘Barbara, quit doing this. You have so much potential. Jesus loves you.’”
“You name the drug, I’ve tried it.” — Barbara Josephs, electrician
But Josephs had worn out the Roosevelt administrators’ patience, and they expelled her. Yet even as she found herself having to travel across town and run between bus stops just to get to and from school, she couldn’t tear herself away from the substances that had landed her in such a situation.
“I used to roll joints and sell them,” Josephs said. “I paid cash for a car when I was 16 with dirty money. I was that kid. You name the drug, I’ve tried it.”
Despite her ongoing experimentation with drugs and alcohol, Josephs excelled in school and athletics, determined not to become like her older sisters who had gotten pregnant at 15 and 16 and dropped out of school. Being a central figure on the basketball team “kept [her] out of trouble.” Baltus chalked up Josephs’ athletic affinity to natural gifts, but Josephs claimed another source.
“I think I attest it to running,” Josephs said, adding that when she got kicked out of school in eighth grade, she had to run between bus stops downtown St. Paul in the dark after her sports practices. “When I grew up in the projects, I was always being chased. I would run as fast as I could home, and I was scared.”
But even with athletics as a focal point in her life, Josephs couldn’t get away from substances. Instead, the situation became more complex when she met her now ex-husband, Steve Josephs, and married him when she was 19. Their relationship was ill-fated from the start, yet they welcomed their daughter, Cristy, into the world when Josephs was 21. Still, she wasn’t ready to give up sports for motherhood.
“It just kind of went really fast,” she said. “Here I am in my 20s with a baby, and I’m playing broomball, I’m playing basketball, softball, and I never wanted to be home, so I didn’t feel like I was a good wife.”
Josephs took Cristy and left Steve when she was 24.
“I broke his heart, and it was horrible,” she said. “I didn’t want anything, but I did take my daughter, and that was more than anything to take.”
Steve spent the next years trying to convince Josephs to come back and try again, but Josephs refused, only wanting to play sports and drink her problems away. She fell back into substances when Cristy was in kindergarten, when all of a sudden, everything stopped.
“Something clicked,” she said. “I just didn’t want to do anything anymore. I just quit. Thank you, God, I was able to quit.”
As a single mom, Josephs desperately needed to work to provide for her and her daughter. She moved to Mounds View, and a strange opportunity fell at her feet.
“I just met somebody, and she needed some work done in the basement,” Josephs said. “She said, ‘I’ll tell you what: you can live here free for a year if you can build a room in the basement and you wire it right.’”
So Josephs, who had no experience with electrical work, checked out a manual from the library.
“I read this book from front to back because I wanted free rent,” she said.
After her success wiring the basement without even a smidge of electrician education, Josephs decided to enroll in vocational schooling at St. Paul College. Between her mother’s impossibly busy schedule of working four days a week and attending classes the fifth day, Cristy became a “latch-key kid,” fending for herself from a young age. She would return home from school, let herself in, and wait for Josephs to call and check on her.
One day in the middle of the winter, Josephs called the home phone. No answer. She called again and again to no avail. Panicked over her daughter’s well-being, Josephs rushed home only to find Cristy stuck in a snowbank, her boot caught in the deep snow.
“She was on top of a snowbank with her boot off, trying to get her boot from the snow,” Josephs said. “I just cried, and then I put her in daycare the very next day.”
“I met Jesus for the first time at a very, very young age,” she said. “I’ve just always wanted to know more about him.”
But knowing Jesus and truly living for him were two vastly different things, Josephs learned as she grew older. Amid the drugs, alcohol and abuse, it took a tragedy for Josephs to give everything up to God.
“I really didn’t start living for him until probably about the 1980s when my mom died,” she said. “Then I knew I had to change my life.”
Margaret’s passing rocked Josephs more than anything had in her life.
Her mother had been one of the only constants in Josephs’ childhood and young adulthood, and even as she tested the line of good and bad behavior with substances, Josephs never wanted to disappoint her mother or make life more challenging for her.
“I did it all for my mom,” she said. “I wasn’t doing anything for me.”
When Josephs was in her mid-30s, Baltus invited her to a Bible study fellowship, and she accepted, even taking up a role in the tech booth to help out.
She was fabulous with questions that she’d have,” Baltus said.“I mean, she loved studying God’s word. She just loved it.”
As Josephs raised her daughter, she made sure to teach Cristy about the Lord and the importance of a relationship with him.
“My mom always, always taught me to love God and to pray,” Cristy said. “She would pray with me every night, teach me how to pray.”
She’s my daughter, and I love her with everything I have, so I started going to church with her. —Barbara Josephs, electrician
Years later, Cristy began going to a Catholic Church and has been a member for nearly four years.
“She’s my daughter, and I love her with everything I have,” Josephs said, “so I started going to church with her.”
Josephs’ relationship with the Lord continued to blossom, and wanting to work in a faith-based community, Josephs left her job as a high school custodian in a step of faith. In a serendipitous series of events, an Indeed job-search ad for a custodial position at Bethel popped up in her email.
And so Josephs applied for, interviewed for and accepted work at Bethel last December and has been working at the university since. As she goes about her day cleaning the Brushaber Commons floors, emptying the trash cans and wiping down windows, she loves to connect with the students and talk about Jesus with them.
“No matter what I do here at Bethel, I just want to be a light to the students… no matter what they need,” she said.
After a lifetime of strife and struggle, she’s finally found her home.
“When I say I’m good, I mean… I’m good,” she said. “I just love God, and that’s enough.”
