PLANT CITY MAN USES HIS TALENT TO SERVE THE HOMELESS.
As a kid, Joshua Vega spent time between Seffner and his grandmother’s house in Plant City. “Growing up, my mom raised six of us all by herself,” he said. “Every time she saw homeless people, she would give them money. I didn’t know it at the time, but my mom barely had any money for us because there were so many of us. Now that I am older, I can see what she was doing. So, I grew up with that passion to help homeless people. It is something God put in my heart. And I have two cousins who are autistic. They are completely disabled, and growing up they were my two best friends, so it is those two categories God always put in my heart to be around. It was always a good feeling to help the homeless and be around my two cousins.”
Between the ages of 18 and 31, Joshua spent 13 years in prison. “So, throughout the majority of my adult life, I was incarcerated,” he commented. “Being in there is when I really got addicted to drugs. Every day, that is all a cared about, doing drugs. When I came out of prison, I brought that with me.” However, when Vega got out, he went into rehab and began to build a new life. He got a job at a barbershop where he was making solid money. “It is not easy to come back from such a long period of your life in prison. It took a lot of God pruning me and God showing me what I should do. God put me through all of that—all of the trials in my life to get me to where I am right now. It gives me the heart to want to help homeless people. It gives me the heart to talk to them. It gets me to want to help them succeed like I did.”
Joshua had a good job, an apartment, and he bought a car. “So, I had everything I needed. But I just felt like something wasn’t right—something wasn’t enough,” Joshua said. “I was already not wanting to be at the barbershop, and instead help out the homeless and disabled. I was on the way to work one day, driving, and I looked over and I saw this bus on the side of the street. God put it in my heart, ‘Go buy that bus and turn it into a barbershop.’ Before I even looked inside it, I knew I was going to buy that big, beat-up bus.” The bus had been a dog grooming truck, and old cabinets and a shampoo bowl filled the interior. “If you looked at it, you would think it was a piece of junk. When I brought that bus home, that is how everybody saw it. They said, ‘What are you doing? That’s a bad idea.’” But Joshua told them, “I am going to make this a barbershop for the homeless and disabled, and I am going to give them haircuts. That is what God put in my heart to do.” It turned out the engine of the vehicle is a 1999 Ford 7.3 liter diesel—according to Slashgear this is the best year of perhaps the best diesel engine Ford has ever made. Though the engine had 220,000 miles, according to Ford, many of these surpass half a million miles.
Joshua worked all day, every day. Then he spent a couple of hours a night fixing up the bus. He demolished what he couldn’t use. He built the floors and the cabinets. He installed the barber’s chair and the set up for a functioning barbershop. “I built a little bit at a time, a little bit at time,” Joshua said. Then Joshua felt like he was led to quit his job and just trust God. “You want me to build this bus, but I don’t have the money to build this bus,” Joshua said many times. “God used to just talk to me every day, and say, ‘Just keep building this bus a little bit at a time, and I will give you a little bit at a time—just as much as you can handle.’ The people in his neighborhood found out about what he was doing, and watched the transformation of the bus. “Every time I was about to give up, God would send me a signal, or somebody coming up and saying something like, ‘Here’s 40 bucks. Keep doing what you are doing.’” Also, along the way, “God sent people” to help Joshua do things like paint the bus and help repair and maintain it.
Once the bus got to the place where he could use it, Joshua started going to Tampa to give free haircuts to homeless people once a month, working with another person who gave them food and clothes. Then it became once a week…then twice a week…then three times a week. When not giving free haircuts he would do paid haircuts to make some money. “This is the way I looked at it—all I had was the money that God sent me. If, during the week, God sent me seven or eight people to cut their hair, I had just enough money to put gas in the truck. Just enough money to get there and get back. I did that for almost a year, and a little at a time God was working on me. God was changing me a little at a time—building my character, building my patience. He would give me just a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. And He taught me that it wasn’t about the money to be able to do what you’re doing. It’s about the trust and the faith you have in Him. God made that bus my ministry.”
Joshua’s gets satisfaction from, “Going out there and helping out the homeless and disabled,” he said. “The satisfaction you get from giving somebody a free haircut—they are just the most grateful people in the world. Some of them haven’t been to a barbershop in 30 years. God gave me the talent to cut hair. And He is able to use me as a way to help people. It is a great feeling to be able to go and do that.” Joshua has the chance to talk to homeless people while he is cutting their hair, and tell them about his life, saying, “Hey, if I can do it, there is no way you can’t get up and do it yourself too.”
Joshua’s vision for the future is to add a shower trailer and pull it behind the bus. That way he can give homeless people a haircut, a shower, and a set of clothes. He is waiting for God to give him the way to get there. A shower trailer would cost $40,000 to buy. But if he builds it himself, it would cost only $15,000…a little bit at a time…a little bit at a time.
