THE BEGINNING by Karen Kingsbury

I read the Karen Kingsbury story, The Bridge, last year and loved it.  So I was excited to get the short story, The Beginning, because it is a prequel to The Bridge.  It was so good to remember Donna and Charlie Barton, the owners of the bookstore called The Bridge.  It  was good  to go back and read how each of them came to find one another, fall in love and start their dream of a bookstore.  This is a very short story, but full of warm memories and precious moments in their life.  Charlie made Donna laugh, I liked that about him; and they both loved to read, so starting a bookstore seemed the right thing to do.  They will suffer a great loss in their marriage, but they were hoping that through the bookstore they could be a part of changing and helping others and that then their pain would start to grow dim.  God would begin to heal them and then use them.  As Charlie prayed that  "the Lord might bring people who needed something to get them from the pain of yesterday to the possibility of tomorrow.  People who needed God and the two of them."  You will also meet Edna from the book The Bridge and see how the scrapbook got started that will tell and show people down through the years how much of a difference The Barton's made in the lifes of so many.  This was so good, it makes me want to get out "The Bridge" and read it all over again!