Are the answers to our prayers closer than we think? That proved to be the case in the incredible true story of Springdale, Ohio, reggae club owner Robert Allen. Adopted shortly after birth, his records sealed, Robert never knew where he came from. For 40 years, he often wondered—do I have siblings? Will I ever see them? Will I ever meet my birth mom? After so long, his questions seemed unlikely to be answered… if not for mysterious ways.
This March, his adoption records were finally unsealed by the state. As it turned out, the answers he sought weren’t so far away.
According to the story on Yahoo! Parenting, when Robert contacted his siblings, he made a remarkable discovery. His mom and siblings had been regular customers of a store he once owned in town. Not only that, his biological mother and adoptive mother both worked at the same hospital in Cincinnati at the same time.
Even though Robert learned that his mother had since passed away, the knowledge that he’d interacted with her while she was alive was incredibly comforting to him. “We have been passing each other our whole lives,” Robert says. “I’ve seen my mother and she’d seen me, but we didn’t know each other. But we did see each other. Learning that was a real emotional moment for me.”
Robert credits a higher power for helping him and his siblings make these connections after all these years. “I know it’s divine intervention,” he says. “My mom is up there pulling the strings. Definitely.”
It’s amazing to think about, but long-lost relatives have often reunited through mysterious ways and found surprising connections between them. Sisters Lin Backman and Emilie Falk found each other thanks to an Indonesian taxi cab driver and marveled over the fact they both married their husbands on the same day.
One of our readers, Holly Funk of Lyon, Illinois, told us how a strange feeling and a stuffed lamb helped her discover that her adopted daughter, Mia, had a twin with a familiar name.
A rare talent catapulted Olympic gold-winning gymnast Dominique Moceanu into the limelight, which helped her connect with the similarly-talented sister she never knew existed.
Half-brothers Rick Hill and Joe Parker knew about each other but never met, until one helped the other take a family photo on a Hawaiian beach.
And in May of this year, two sisters met in a college writing class one sister hadn’t even planned to take until the last minute.
Is it just a “small world,” or is someone working overtime to put broken families back together? What do you think? Have you found someone through extraordinary circumstances—mysterious ways? Share your story with us.
