Do you believe in coincidences?

Jane Evanstar doesn't seem to, which is why a recent series of events has led her to expect what some might call a miracle: reunification with a son she never knew, and hasn't seen in more than 56 years.

Today, the 72-year-old is pastor of True Light Christian Church in Anderson, which incorporates a litany of religious and secular philosophies into a creed professing that “thoughts are things” and that “we create our own reality by the thoughts we think.”

In 1953, however, Evanstar's thoughts created a reality she neither wanted nor expected. Sixteen years old and living in Ohio with her father and stepmother, she developed a crush on the much-older manager of a bowling alley and, after several glasses of champagne and her first sexual experience, she became pregnant.

Today, such a thing might be considered a crime - or at least a form of abuse or exploitation. But Evanstar remembers that, in those days, even this kind of out-of-wedlock pregnancy “made you a bad girl, like the ‘scarlet letter.' I was just angry at life.”

So Evanstar - Jane White at the time - moved into an apartment in Fort Wayne with her grandmother for three months before giving birth to a son at St. Joseph Hospital on Nov. 9, 1953. Unable to raise a child, unwilling to seek a then-illegal abortion and convinced the newborn could be a gift for someone, she gave the baby up for an adoption arranged by her doctor.

And, despite thinking of him from time to time, Evanstar didn't really dwell on the fate or whereabouts of her only son for more than five decades - until her job as a minister-psychologist forced her to confront lost-child issues last year, after which she developed a pain in her leg and hip several medical doctors could neither explain nor cure.

Only then did it dawn on her: The pain was the result of the unfulfilled emotional link to her son. “It may be that he has wanted to find me, and I subconsciously picked up the vibrations,” Evanstar said. “I had frozen my feelings, and put them on a shelf.”

Unwilling to spend thousands of dollars on a professional search, she placed an inch-square classified ad in Fort Wayne Newspapers earlier this month, convinced that - if it was meant to be - even a tiny ad would be sufficient.

As of Wednesday, the ad had generated only one phone call. Mine.

You and I might consider such an inquiry to be nothing more than simple journalism. In Evanstar's reality, there may have been a much higher power at work.

“I agreed to make an effort to find the child, and then you appear. This exchange feels like a divine appointment,” Evanstar said as she nibbled at lunch in an Anderson restaurant while sitting next to 50-year-old Lynn Goetz, one of her two daughters and, to Evanstar, yet another sign fate may be on her side.

Neither Oklahoma resident Goetz nor her oldest daughter, 53-year-old Lisa Cochran of Missouri, have been able to have children, and the addition of a brother and perhaps grandchildren after all this time would help fill the void in what has always been a close family, Evanstar and Goetz said. “And you just happened to call the day Lynn is on town,” Evanstar said.

“I don't have any fantasy of what (my brother) might be like,” Goetz said. “I hope he's happy, but maybe he's ready to hear from us. We just want to open the door. If he comes through it, it would be wonderful.”

“Whatever he would want from us would be OK,” added Evanstar. “This could be a grand adventure, or at least a completion either way.”

It's true, of course, that Evanstar could search for her son, if he's even still alive, in a way that don't cost a lot of money. For example, privacy concerns prevent the Board of Health from sharing the hospital's birth records with me, but as mother Evanstar would have access to them.

But if you believe that thoughts can turn into reality, maybe the “coincidences” that have happened already are enough to signal a happy ending.

Especially when you know that Evanstar's father attended New Haven High School, as I did.

And her son's birth date is only one day removed from my wedding anniversary.

And this story in being printed just two days before the 10th annual National Adoption Day, created to celebrate and promote the kind of decision Evanstar made all those years ago, and to help find loving homes for more than 129,000 American foster children still looking for the kind of life Evanstar hopes her son has found, and will soon able and willing to share.