Any preacher can identify with the parable of the sower.
On Sunday the results get scattered out. I can see that some of you are preoccupied with your own thoughts and do not hear a word I am saying. Some listen and thank me for my words but forget all of them by the end of the day. But every now and then some one will quote to me a sermon I preached eight years ago that began a process that changed his life. Preaching is a highly inefficient enterprise akin to scatter sowing.