Favorite conversion stories? (George Whitefield, Spurgeon, etc.)

Now that was an experience!

 

My favorite is still that of an absolutely unkown, unassuming, country preacher in a small, unassuming country church in a small, dusty, communist and muslim rebels-infested Southern Philippine town who was born to and raised by communist rebel parents up in the mountains to be a hard core Marxist and a dialectical atheist and who have never seen a Bible, and had hands as blood stained as King David's.

Another one would be that of a son of a landed family in the Philippines who grew up a toughie, and mean as mean can be. In jail, he was a gang leader, and when other gangs yelled a challenge to him for a knife fight, he would either come out swinging, or would yell back to wait for him while he finished lunch or dinner or a shower. Knife fights and killing was so ordinary for him the authorities had to constantly isolate him from other prisoners. He got tired of it himself and "retired" himself from gangfights.
Sent to a prison farm, he found a Bible left by one of the inmates, and started reading from it, and was convicted and converted and began preaching right there in the farm.
Don't know what he preached and how, but the Lord seemed to work things out for him because in less than 2 years his sentence was commuted from death to life and then absolute pardon.

The preachers you mentioned have remarkable conversions, but they have been exposed to preaching most of their lives.

The two above ? One had absolutely no religious upbringing, and the other had minimal religious training.

 

I've kinda warmed up so let me share my own half brother's experience.
This baby half brother of mine was so bad------zzz he once set fire to his high school, and then chased his principal around with a slingshot. In his late teens he downed a fistful of uppers followed by a joint or a fistful of downers followed by a joint and beer.
Later on he went into H, and got to a point where he shot thru his femoral.
His life was an entire mess. I was in the provinces at the time, had no contact with my siblings at all.
This was about the time when his mother, my stepmom, converted from Catholicism to Full Gospel, and badgered him constantly with Scriptures and prayers.
One morning he says he just woke up from a night of downers and heroin and began thinking about his life, at 19, and how messed up it was, and he started to cry.
He broke the lightbulb in his room and just cried and cried, and said, "God, if you exist, and if you hear me, reach out to me and heal me, because I don't know where to turn. Please help me."
Then for some reason he says he just felt so sleepy, and went back to sleep, and slept through the day and on to the next, and when he woke up, he felt something was different.
He had no craving for drugs, no craving for tobacco, no craving for alcohol, and he felt clean and at peace, and he knew something happened to him.
He went out of the house, and to the store to buy some cold bottled water, and something to eat, and met one of his friends who said they had a "score" coming up, and he just said, "no, thanks, I don't need that anymore. God took it away from me."
The next day he dressed up and looked for a job, and found one at Dunkin' Donuts, and he was required to do a drug test, and you know how if you'd been using drugs, it stayed in your system for a long, long time and would show up in any drug test.
Well, he came out clean, and the hospital director, who happened to be our uncle (Father's first cousin), had the test redone three times, because he knew what my brother was, before he finally admitted that this was remarkable.
That was 29 years ago yesterday, which was my baby half brother's birthday.
His walk, of course, with the Lord, had, like many of us, not always been rosy, but, He's kept his hand in His, nevertheless.