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And I was very interested in the priesthood.

The priesthood is not really so much a gift as it is a commission to serve, a privilege to lift, and an opportunity to bless the lives of others.

My brother Joseph, who is 14 years older than me, was already on his national military compulsory service when I was 4 years old, the age from which I remember myself.

At the end of four years' time, at graduation, we were down to 12. At our reunion that we had several years ago, only 1 out of the 52 actually made it to ordination and priesthood. So there you go, there's your numbers.

I hope with all my heart and soul that every young man who receives the priesthood will honor that priesthood and be true to the trust which is conveyed when it is conferred. May each of us who holds the priesthood of God know what he believes.

Supposedly, going to war initiates you into this gnostic priesthood of people who've had a liminal experience forever separating them from civilians. Except... you go there, and it is what it is. A form of human activity as varied as any other.

I was with a special services unit in the Korean war, and when I got out, the biggest thing I got was a GI scholarship.

I was drafted during the Korean War.

In the '50s and '60s, a family's first child went into the priesthood, the second went into the military, and the third child was an idiot and wound up in advertising.

In the priesthood we share the sacred duty to labor for the souls of men. We must do more than learn that this is our duty. It must go down into our hearts so deeply that neither the many demands on our efforts in the bloom of life nor the trials that come with age can turn us from that purpose.