Author and theologian R. C. Sproul recounts his conversion:

I had actually gone to a church-related college, but I went on a football scholarship, not because of any interest in the church. At the end my first week, which was spent in freshman orientation, my roommate and I decided to hit some of the bars across the border. We get to the parking lot, and I realized that I was out of cigarettes.

So I went back in the dorm and went to the cigarette machine. I got my Luckys and turned around and saw the captain of the football team sitting at a table. He spoke to me and my roommate and invited us to come over and chat, and we did. This was the first person I ever met in my life that talked about Christ as a reality.

I'd never heard anything like it. I was just absorbed, sat there for two or three hours…. He didn't give a traditional evangelism talk to me; he just kept talking to me about the wisdom of the word of God. He quoted Ecclesiastes 11:3: "Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where it falls, there will it lie." I just feel certain I'm the only person in church history that was converted by that verse. God just took that verse and struck my soul with it. I saw myself as a log that was rotting in the woods. And I was going nowhere.

When I left that guy's table, I went up to my room. And in my room by myself, in the dark, I got on my knees and cried out to God to forgive me.