What "The Waitress" Teaches About Self Worth And Psalm 139

In the second message in Pastor Darren's summer series on recent Broadway musicals, a diner waitress who names her feelings in pies might be the last place you expect to find a lesson on Christian self-worth, but "The Waitress"  goes straight to the questions many of us avoid: What happens when your life stops feeling like it belongs to you? How do you come back from choices you regret, harm you didn’t deserve, or a future that arrived before you were ready?

We walk through Jenna Hunterson’s story, from a trapped marriage and an unwanted pregnancy to an affair that makes everything messier, and a desperate plan to save prize money for a clean start. When that plan collapses, the real work begins: finding the inner strength to leave what is crushing her, reject what is not love, and take ownership of her life. That arc opens a bigger conversation about identity, agency, and what “starting over” actually costs.

Then we bring it home to faith. We unpack the tension Christians feel about pride, drawing a clear line between healthy pride that celebrates doing good with God and ego that pretends we don’t need God at all. Psalm 139 anchors the whole message, reminding us we are fearfully and wonderfully made, fully known, and not able to outrun God’s presence, like the relentless love in The Runaway Bunny. We end with the emotional punch of “She Used to Be Mine,” and the hope that God can lead us back to who we were created to be.

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Transcript

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Pastor Darren 0:00

Well,

Broadway Series And Waitress Intro

Pastor Darren 0:01

like I said, we have started our uh we call it our Broadway series because we're dealing with uh Broadway musicals, uh, especially some recent ones, maybe the last 20 or so years, and um introducing some new songs maybe to some of you. Well, especially when I asked how many saw The Waitress, I didn't see a lot of hands there. You're missing a good one there. So uh the movie or or the musical, The Waitress, actually started as a film first. A lot of times things go back the other way, but you can see this is the poster for the movie with Carrie Russell. Uh, and it was, again, kind of a small picture, but a very human picture and and uh uh um uh really well acted and appreciated. Well, it uh inspired amongst some people, including uh a uh musician named Sarah Barielis, to create a musical around this. So it started off with this is uh Jesse Mueller was the one who originated the role, uh, and uh she touched a lot of hearts with her performance in this uh uh in the musical. Uh but then Sarah Barielis herself actually took on uh the red the main role for a while too. I think we even have a poster of that, or maybe we didn't get that one. All right, we didn't get that one, but it was uh um uh uh got a lot of Tony nominations in 2016, uh, and even won one along the way, so it was uh much appreciated. So,

Jenna’s Plan To Escape

Pastor Darren 1:40

some of the story of waitress. You have Jenna Hunterson, right? And she works at a diner with her close friends Becky and Dawn. What she is known for in this community is making these very special pies. And she would dress them up in really special ways, uh, and then she would give them names, and uh, the name would be reflected in the kind of the taste of that pie, but also what it was reflecting on in her life and what was uh uh going on was reflected inside that pie. So this was a big part of the fun of the of the uh uh story itself. Well, so Jenna finds out she is pregnant with her husband's baby Earl, uh, but this is not something she wants because Earl is not the best husband, not necessarily kind, maybe even abusive, and not really ambitious in the way you might hope somebody would be when they're taking care of a family. Then to make matters worse, Jenna visits her new obstetrician, Dr. Jim Pometer. I think I said it right, and the two start an unexpected and intense romance. An affair. All right, so she's makes uh bad kind of go to worse. So she starts developing her plan to figure out how she's gonna work her way out of all of this. Uh, and her plan as this great pie baker is that she's gonna save up prize money from a bunch of these regional pie contests, and then she's gonna fund herself to be able to move on to a new life. That is the plan, and the setback happens when that husband Earl he finds that hidden, saved money, and takes it, forcing Jenna to confront this reality that um she's about to have a baby and she has no resources to be able to set out and and find the life that is going to be more rewarding for her and for her baby. So

The Turning Point After Lulu

Pastor Darren 4:10

as we come to the end of the story as it flourishes, uh by the way, you've had 10 years to know the story, so I get to spoil. All right. Next week, I think we're doing uh um Hamilton. So go ahead and watch it, then you can't get spoiled. Actually, I think we're gonna screen Hamilton on the 28th here. We'll have fun on a movie night. In any case, Jenna has her baby named Lulu, a little girl named Lulu, and then looking at her daughter, she finds the inner strength to leave Earl for good, to reject the affair that she had started, and to take ownership of her own life. So hopefully it sounds to you like kind of one of our regular American stories of tough things going on and then figuring it out and everybody being able to uh feel good about that figuring it out. Uh, because it it's a story about reclaiming her life. Really, that's a lot of what's going on here as she's trying to reclaim her life. And I imagine that's not too unfamiliar an experience for people in the room. I think to varying degrees, we've probably been in positions and times where we were uh needing to reclaim our life in some way, right? For some of us, maybe it was an important life pivot because life sent you a couple of curve balls and you had to figure it out. Maybe for others it was something a little more dark. You know, maybe somebody done you wrong and you had to figure that out, or maybe, also common, you did yourself wrong in some way. But I think we all can probably relate to a story of restart and reclaiming who you are and who you want to be. And this is the story for Jenna Hunterson, the waitress, right? It it becomes this story about her self-worth and her ability to reclaim that self-worth.

Pride Versus Ego In Faith

Pastor Darren 6:21

And what makes it interesting, now that we're on this journey of Broadway musicals in church, is to talk about something like self-worth in the church. You ever had that conversation about whether or not we're allowed to feel prideful as Christians? I've heard y'all say it when I'm talking to you. Oh, I'm not sure I'm supposed to be proud of this, but uh, you know, we did this, and you know, it worked out pretty good. And so we're hedging just a little bit. We're not supposed to be prideful, we hear, and we know why. You know, often pride it becomes that that first step to to an overconfidence, that first step to feeling like we don't really need God, or or that we don't need to do what we are doing or reach the goals we are trying to reach in godly ways and doing godly things. Often uh our pride is what begins the journey into those places. At the same time, though, we know the value, we know the importance of liking ourselves, right? We know psychologically how important it is to have some pride. So we get stuck sometimes in this Christian conundrum. Are we allowed to feel good when we do the right thing? How many feel like we're allowed to feel good when we do the right thing? Yeah, yeah? How many feel like nope, nope, nope, slippery slope? Ah, you're in the right church. All right, so we're gonna make our our solution for ourselves. We're gonna create some semantic rules, right? Rules for words. Here are our rules. We are going to call pride the good stuff. You did the right thing, well done. You and God working in step, you're blessing the world together. This is awesome. That's pride. The bad stuff, let's call that, you know, this overconfidence, this not needing God. Why don't we call that ego? I don't know if Oxford Dictionary has it lined up that way, but for purposes of this conversation that we're having, let's use the words that way, because it allows us to talk about Christian pride. It allows

Psalm 139 As The Grounding

Pastor Darren 9:02

us to get our brains around how we're uh enabled to be able to feel good about ourselves. And it takes me to Psalm 139. Our source of our pride as Christians, right, is our sense of our sense of worthiness, our sense of purpose. It comes from our understanding that we are created by God in God's image. The source of all that is good also made us. Therefore, making us good too at base. And this is the grounding in our passage in Psalm 139. Some of you might know it already. Is this one of your favorites? Anyone in the room? Yeah, for some of us, it's been a very meaningful passage. Uh uh, there's a pastor, Jason Bayassi. He was uh writing in uh workingpreacher.com. He wrote, Psalm 139 is one of the most beloved of the Psalms. You might have it in Needlepoint somewhere. Donna, is it in needlepoint? No. In music? Oh, very good. All right. Well, we'll call that second best. But I'll check in next week. I want a needlepoint. Oh, I'm teasing a little bit. You might see it in needlepoint somewhere. You hem me in behind and before. Wonderful are your works. It was you who formed my inward parts. How weighty are your thoughts of me, oh God. They are more than the sand. Right? It doesn't take too much sentiment sentimentality to come to some emotions there with some of those phrases. And I'm sure many of us have lived life in a way we've landed where those phrases were so important, reshaped our hearts, got us back, and going again. The passage two talks a bit about how futile it is to run from this understanding of God. You know, the the thought of this deep level of intimacy with God. God made us, knows all parts of us. What we're going to do, what we are doing. For some of us, there might be this tendency to want to move away from that, to run away from it, or even deny it. Jason

The Runaway Bunny And God’s Pursuit

Pastor Darren 11:40

uh uh byannise, he also points to the kid's book, The Runaway Bunny. Have any of you read The Runaway Bunny? If you worked with kids, you probably read The Runaway Bunny. It's a really cute story. This baby bunny tells his mother he plans to run away. The thing is, his mom, the older bunny, she can go to extraordinary lengths to find him. So if he becomes a fish in a stream, well, she can become a fisher and fish for him. If he becomes a bird, she will be uh she will be a tree in which he can land. If he becomes a little boy, she will be that maternal presence that he comes home to, that he returns to. Finally, the baby bunny says, Shucks, I might just as well stay here and be your little bunny. And mom says, have a carrot. That connection, right? That intimacy, it's our source of life as Christians, this uh understanding of a God that knows us so completely and has all capacity to be able to maintain that connection. That is our source of worth. It's our source of purpose, it's uh our source of understanding who we are. And it comes from this sense of being created fearfully and wonderfully by God. This

Why She Used To Be Mine Hurts

Pastor Darren 13:21

is what leads me to our song for today. The song, despite my uh pastor title here, is called She Used to Be Mine. I should let you know the place for this song in the story is that she has officially hit bottom. She is in uh uh the hospital bed recognizing she's about to give birth very, very soon. She's realized that her husband has taken that money that she was saving to be able to go start life anew. So it's gone. And she's feeling very, very hopeless. And in that hopelessness, as she's sitting there, she starts to reflect on how her life at one time projected very, very differently. Right when she was younger, right? She looks back, this old that old line, it wasn't supposed to be like this. Part of why I like the song too, is because she doesn't describe herself as perfect. You'll hear in the lyrics, there's the good sides and the not so good sides, but it was her. It was her, an honest assessment of herself. But she's in there too, recognizing that this is not where she intended to be. I used to be this person. You know, the obvious lyric to it would have been, she used to be me. Not mine. She used to be me. I loved that Sarah Bariellis took it that one step further. No, no, she used to be mine. That's the life I used to own, that life I used to control that was in my grasp. I wonder what we think uh would be the Christian version of such a song. We wouldn't generally say, I used to be mine, right? God plays too big a role in our creation and and hopefully in our life, our whole sense of ourselves. God needs to be in that equation. We might say something like, I was supposed to be him. I was supposed to be her. This is who God created me to be, the role I'm supposed to fill. God, what what God formed inside of me, what God knit in knitting me together in my mother's womb. This is how God made me fearfully and wonderfully. I'm supposed to be this. The hope as we hear this song is that you will feel not only the the weight of that moment for her, but you might also recognize the joy as that epiphany comes to her of who she's supposed to be, or how we would say it, who God was intending her to be, who God gifted her to be. I think this is the realization, uh, it's just like our Psalm 139 of recognizing that that essence of ourself. After this moment, she will go on to leave her husband, she will reject the affair and start her life and get this. Her life includes opening a pie shop. So, friends, I'm gonna invite you to hear uh the word of God and she used to be mine.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

It's

Song Lyrics And Closing Moment

SPEAKER_01 17:50

not simple to say most days I don't recognize me with these shoes and this apron, that place and its patrons has taken more than I gave them. It's not easy to know I'm not anything like I used to be, although it's true I was never attention sweet centre. I still remember that girl. She's imperfect but she tries. She is good but she lies, she is hot on herself. She is broken and wanna ask for help. She is messy but she's kind. She is lovely most of the time she's all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie. She is gone, but she used to be my asked for. Sometimes life just slips in through back door and carves out a person and makes you believe it's all true. And now I've got you, and you're not what I asked for. If I'm honest, I know I would give it all back for a chance to start over and rewrite an ending or two. For the girl that I knew who'd be reckless just enough, who'd get hurt, but who learns how to toughen up when she's bruised, and gets used by a man who can't love. And then she gets stuck and be scared of the life that's inside her, growing stronger each day, and finally reminds her to fight just a lot and bring back the sight that's been kind and used to be mine used to be my She is messy, but she's kind She is lonely most of the time she's all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie. She's gone, but she used to be my