On occasion back when I was in college, my friends and I would go to this home-style restaurant called The Home Place.

The Home Place is the kind of restaurant you think about when one combines the word Amish with the word delectable…unless you have some kind of a bizarre imagination that takes you in a totally different mental direction, and if that’s the case, call your psychiatric health physician immediately.

Anyway, back to the food. Juicy fried chicken, tender roast beef, smoked turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, corn on the cob, gravy, biscuits, gravy, cornbread, and iced tea…and gravy. All of this and all you can eat. A dream come true for any college dude looking to work on his freshman fifteen.

The restaurant was a good thirty-minute drive from campus, so more often than not, we’d get up late and go on a weekend for lunchtime. If we knew we were going the next day, sometimes we wouldn’t eat dinner that night just so we could justify the gluttony when we got there; that’s how good this place was.

The establishment was a converted old farmhouse and the atmosphere inside really added to the home-style country appeal that they were going for. My friends and I all agreed that it was more delicious and more authentic than any of the 6 billion Cracker Barrel restaurants sprinkled throughout the nation. And the size of the line out front of the Home Place always proved us right.

The standard wait time was consistently 30-45 minutes, regardless of when you showed up, and the waiting area was always crowded. It was also torture. When we would put our name in for a table, we would be forced to sit or stand in this little room that I could only assume used to be a small den or mud room back when the place used to be a lived-in house. It was connected to a long hallway that opened up to the main dining area, giving everyone waiting for lunch the perfect view of what it was like to be fed and content with the world.

For what would seem like hours, we would loiter in the den with grumbling stomachs and smell all the delicious items as they were piled onto platters and taken to insatiable customers, sitting at crowded tables while demanding from their waitresses, “More chicken! More potatoes! More iced tea! More gravy!” I’m not going to lie: I hated every one of them.

Now, there were basically two types of customers in the Home Place at any given time that one would show up there—the stuffed and the starving. The stuffed were the ones at the tables that continually bellowed for more as they gorged themselves on wonderful home-style cooking. The starving were the poor saps that had to dwell in the waiting room and stare at other people as they ate.

Recently, I heard a talk from someone at a conference that made me come to a shocking realization: the same two types of people exist all over America today—the stuffed and the starving. No, I’m not making a literal commentary on why we should be feeding the poor (which is no doubt very important), but I am talking about the contrast of people in their differing spiritual conditions.

Christians often sit at the table of God and receive His grace, wanting for nothing but more. “It’s all about me. How can my church pour into me? What kind of group can I be involved in with believers that will spiritually benefit me? Who will disciple me? What kind of worship music best caters to my taste? Where can I serve most comfortably but get the most reward? Me, me, me…it’s all about me.” They are stuffed with the good gifts of God, yet they hold their plates up to His face and continually shout, “More blessing please!”

The majority of the population, however, is spiritually starving. They have no idea what it truly means to have a personal relationship with God. Whether they realize it or not, they are hungry for the kind of love and blessing that can only come from Jesus Christ, and it’s time to pass the plate. If we don’t get up from the table and recognize that it isn’t always about what spiritually benefits me the most, the spiritually starving will continue to grow anemic while we sit and ask for more from God.

As American Christians, we’ve been given the kind of blessings that are only dreamt about in other parts of the world. There are literally thousands of books that you could go online and buy right this second to help with any type of spiritual issue you might be going through. You can go to any bible-believing church and get plugged in to an environment that feeds and nurtures you in the Lord. There are college and high school ministries all over the nation that pour into Christian students and spur on growth, depth and development as a passionate follower of Jesus. We are spoiled, my friends, and it is time to pass the plate.

If we refuse and stay seated at the table, we are like the obese people at the end of Wall*E that obsess about themselves and continue to feed because it’s comfortable. In the movie, they eventually opened their eyes to see the truth, however, and it’s high time we did too. It’s time to pass the plate.