The Adjal of Jimmy Temple

About the Authors

The Failed Life of a Mormon Missionary

In 1830 in Palmyra, New York an angel showed

Joseph Smith a series of gold plates .... today the

Mormon church has 22 million members.

#####

"The Devil is inside me!" Hollar Nimbell screamed and leapt out of bed. Satan's cloven hooves and spiked tail threshed devilishly within Hollar Nimbell's body as he staggered into the bathroom and tore off his pajama top and in the full-length mirror peered terrified at his naked back.

His wife, startled awake, cried, "Hollar, what are you doing?"

"He has me!" her husband said, his eyes fixed on his back.

"Who has you?" she asked.

"Can't you see him?" he said.

"See who? What!"

He did not reply. He could not. Satan had seized his voice. What he expected his wife to see was the bulge in his shoulders where the devil clung.

No bulge, but the devil was there. Hollar Nimbell could sense him, the horned head twitching up inside Hollar Nimbell's neck and into his brain, shouting dirty, filthy words. Hollar Nimbell smashed his own head against the mirror to jar the devil out. The devil held fast.

Sixty year old Hollar Nimbell was an apostle in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of twelve men who in this year of our Lord, 1952, directed the affairs of two million Mormons world-wide. Now, on a stormy April night, Apostle Nimbell himself had been summoned for testing. He was equal to the task.

He pressed the bloody gash in his forehead against the mirror and fell to his knees and raised his right hand to the square. "Satan, get thee behind me! By the power of the Melchizedick priesthood I command you to leave my body!"

Apostle Nimbell felt the power of the Holy Ghost whirling within him. A searing desert wind blasted through the apostle's entire being and blew the devil back to hell.

Soon afterward, in church and in public, the apostle described his Beelzebub Battle. All, Mormon and non-Mormon, who heard the apostle acknowledged the apostle's courage. (Some non-believers and, regrettably, a few believers, joked about Apostle Nimbell being too nimble for even the devil to catch.)

Ten years passed. Now seventy, his appearance was that of a much older man. Beyond possession, the devil had attacked Apostle Nimbell with ailments ranging from typhoid fever to near-drowning, had taken his mother when the apostle was eleven. Had even taken his four sisters before their adolescence. Lesser men would have crumpled.

In addition to thwarting The Devil, Apostle Nimbell had beaten throat cancer, vanquished depression, and overcome facial ticks. Surely Father in Heaven would allot him a few more years to complete unfinished work. If ever there was a time for an apostle, a servant of the Lord, to counter The Prince of Darkness, this was that time. It was not easy. Part of his voice box had been destroyed by the surgeon's scalpel and radiation. Apostle Nimbell's voice now sounded more like a rattle. Some of the kids in church giggled when he preached. He ignored them. The youth of Zion simply did not understand Satan's evil.

In June of 1962 Apostle Nimbell was considered the prime candidate for the church's next president. Gasoline was twenty-five cents a gallon. Elvis Presley and The Beach Boys were on top of the charts. To Kill a Mocking Bird was a bestseller.

Gas and literature did not concern the apostle. Presley and the Beach Boys did. The youth of the church were all too vulnerable to Lucifer's relentless efforts to destroy them. The Devil knew that without the youth the church would perish. But Father in Heaven also knew this. And God favored the LDS church.