For the record, I do not consider myself accident prone, although I seem to hurt myself a lot. I’m not clumsy, I just have a tendency to do everything—work and play—hard and fast. Life’s too short to dilly-dally, right?

And now that I have three kids, three pigs and a giant mobile chicken house to move and clean frequently, I find my legs are beginning to look like over-ripe bananas.

Just this last week, I had a tight schedule to keep. I ran out to do the chores, showered, gathered my rambunctious 5 and 2 year old boys, and all of our stuff and hurried them to the car, just in time to crack my right knee as hard as you can possibly imagine on the inside of the door.

It hurt. I knew I was going to have nasty bruise. I could feel the egg-shaped lump growing immediately. My knee throbbed the entire 90 miles to Goshen, Indiana.

As the day progressed I came to realize how often, while I am talking, I slap my hands or fists on my right knee (I’m right-handed). Then, when I got back to Ohio, and started unloading the boys from the babysitter’s house, wouldn’t you believe that my 2 year old planted his heel right into my right knee to crawl into his car seat.

As the week has progressed, I am amazed at how frequently I am reinjuring myself. I suppose the deeper the bruise, the more sensitive it is to the slightest touch. Between my kids, my husband and even myself, it seems that these days my knee hurts all the time.

Even the slightest innocuous touch feels like a new assault and reduces me to tears, and then I think, “Stupid car door!”

The good thing about physical bruises, or at least the ones that we notice, are that we remember why we have the pain in the first place. “Stupid car door!” I know that, even though my children and my husband may cause me immediate pain, it is not their fault. It is the remnant of a previous injury.

Unfortunately, emotional and psychological bruises do not present themselves visually to us on a regular basis and so often we forget we even have them. We seem to get better, we move on with life, and then in a moment, unexpectedly, somebody knowingly or unknowingly re-injures our deepest wounds.

They likely didn’t know we had them. We forgot we had them. And suddenly the most innocuous event feels like a new assault and reduces us to almost tears.

And of course, the deeper the wound the more sensitive it is to the slightest touch.

Last week I also rediscovered another deep, deep wound. Someone who made a brief appearance in my life, who treated me abhorrently, backed me into a proverbial corner and I had to call them on the phone. I have tried to limit contact with this person in order to preserve my emotional health.

At first I was annoyed. Then mad. Then those around me, who didn’t think it was that big of a deal, started pushing me to do it quickly and get it over with. “Here, I’ll dial for you…” and through their laughter, I came out emotionally swinging. I broke down sobbing. (I never break down sobbing). I couldn’t breathe. I thought I was going to throw up. And it all caught me off guard. And I was mad.

I was mad at those who were pushing me to make the phone call. I was mad at the person for making me have to call. But I knew instantly that my anger and anxiety were disproportional to the request.

Why? Why did my entire body respond the way it did?

I spent the rest of the day trying to identify that feeling I had. I knew that feeling. I’ve had it before. The feeling of complete helplessness, like I didn’t really have a choice. A feeling like I knew something bad was coming, and I just had to grin and bear it. It made me feel like a helpless child at the hands of an abuser, which is my deepest wound. It’s a bruise that has faded over almost 20 years, but apparently it is alive and well, and I never saw it coming.

I wanted to take my anger out on the people around me. I wanted to unleash my tongue on the person who made me call, because sometimes I’m just tired of being the bigger person. I wanted everyone to feel what I was feeling.

No wonder the world is in the mess it is in. No wonder the church is in the mess that it is in.

This is one of the reasons why I am committed to the Anabaptist-Mennonite understanding of faith and ethics, because I believe more than anything that God has called us, the church, to be God’s hands and feet, ears and eyes for the purpose of being agents of healing in the world.

“God calls us to be followers of Jesus Christ, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, to grow as communities of grace, joy, and peace, so that God’s healing and hope flow through us to the world.” This is Mennonite Church USA’s vision statement.

But before we are able to do that, we have to be able to work towards healing within our own community. And it starts with each one of us, individually, and then flowing outward.

We are a deeply wounded people. Until we are able to recognize and address the source of our own bruises, the slightest innocuous touch will always feel like a new assault. And we will continue to be paralyzed from doing our true mission on earth. And the brokenness of the world will just continue.

Jessica Schrock Ringenberg is pastor at Zion Mennonite Church in Archbold, Ohio.