I like to read before going to bed. About a year ago I resurrected my love of novels and quickly realized how good it was for my mind and my soul to delight in another’s story for a time.

Typically my going-to-bed book of choice is an enjoyable, lighthearted read. I’m not ashamed to admit this leads me to the juvenile fiction session because my sensitivities are hyperactive.

In the wintertime I completed all 8 Anne of Green Gables novels (for the first time), The Chronicles of Narnia series (for the hundredth time), the Wrinkle in Time quintet (for the first time), my fourth Fredrik Backman read Brit Marie was Here, and now I’m finishing book four of Harry Potter (for the third or fourth time). Next up is Lord of the Rings since I started and re-started the series but never finished.

Last Fall, I was randomly scrolling the Woodlands Book Collective for a new novel to read. I selected Jodi Picoult’s Small Great Things. After a few nights of reading, I had to put it down. It was so incredibly intense. I didn’t want to stop reading, but at the same time it was too upsetting to read before bed. So I quit.

A few months later, I felt ready to try again. I left Small Great Things on the digital shelf and instead reached for The Storyteller.

“That sounds nice,” I thought.

It wrecked me.

I can’t remember a time I’ve cried quite so hard for quite so long with absolutely no desire to reign in my emotions.

Normally I would tell myself, “Mel, put this down. It’s not worth the mental upheaval.”

But this story, though fiction, is so thoroughly crafted by historical facts that I refused to separate myself from the reality of what I was reading. Jodi Picoult is a brilliant writer and meticulous researcher, and in The Storyteller, she uncovers the past life of an innocent-looking old man and the grandmother of a grieving young woman. Page after page I read in vivid detail the first-hand accounts of a Holocaust survivor and a Nazi SS soldier.

The morning after my gut-wrenching sobs, I shared the experience with a few friends, processing the soul-level encounter I’d had in the pages of an e-book. Then I wrote these words in my journal:

Oh, Jesus, my heart is absolutely broken. I want to be weeping for the children, the mothers, the men, the thousands…millions brutally massacred in the name of “ethnic cleansing.”

How? How could anyone let this happen? How does anyone brutally mistreat another human being? How could someone turn a blind eye to the mass graves, to the children crawling out from under the dying bodies of their parents; an ear from the sounds of screaming and weeping and gnashing of teeth? How did this happen?

How is it still happening?

God, thank you for this brokenness. Help me to know what to do with this.

Fast forward a month and I am learning of the unprovoked shooting of Ahmaud Arbery. A black man was murdered while he was out on a run.

I am always sad when I read news like this, but I don’t normally get involved. This time I said something.

As I #RanWithMaud yesterday morning I ran with the realization that as a white woman I am a beneficiary of systemic injustice. My white privilege allows me to run, alone, anywhere I feel like it, without fear of someone assuming I’m running from a crime scene and gunning me down. That same #whiteprivilege is what kept two men from being arrested for murder months ago. I am appalled. I am angry. I am praying that God’s good justice would roll down like streams of living water. #IRunWithMaud

Something had broken open in me. The same something – a godly grief that leads to repentance * – is what a growing portion of our country seemed to be experiencing.

I finished reading The Storyteller and boldly went back to reading Small Great Things, a novel that feels prophetic in these days of racial unrest and society upheaval.

I know Maud isn’t the first black person to be killed in an act of racial aggression. I grieve not seeing every name, not being able to uncover page after page of bloodshed, not being able to shed tears alongside a (mass)grave no one noticed.

These two novels may be fiction, but their stories are real and essential and demand to be read. But not just read. These words need to take hold of our very souls, shake us to the core of who we are, and keep us from ever going back.

I refuse to join the ranks of the “innocent bystander,” standing limply on the sidelines. I refuse to stop at this momentary sadness, choosing blind trust in a leader or institution or country who demands my allegiance. I cannot and will not let people be killed without weeping and mourning and screaming for justice.

I took the back-door entrance into Social (in)Justice. I am so grateful the Holy Spirit led me through the pages of these novels to prepare me to speak Power, to speak Love, to speak the Justice of Jesus on behalf of the oppressed, the murdered, the marginalized.

And thank you, Jodi, for doing this work. We need your words.