It was announced a few weeks ago that British-born Michael Otterson, who is retiring after having served for many years as director of Public Affairs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has been called to preside over the London England Temple.

I saw a few posts from critics describing this new assignment as his “reward,” supposedly for the slavish lies he’s told on behalf of the Cult.

And, over the years, I’ve seen calls of others — to serve as mission presidents or as General Authorities, or to join the Council of the Twelve — derisively described as if they were invitations sit upon a throne while being wafted with peacock feather fans and receiving the adulation of the multitude.

If such comments have been serious, they reveal a deep misapprehension of the nature of these callings. (I’ll say nothing about the baseless and uncharitable allegation that Brother Otterson was lying. The same charge is routinely leveled, with equal inaccuracy, against me.)

I have a friend — we’ve known each other since before our missions — who was called to the Seventy quite a while ago, at a relatively young age. At one point, years into his calling (in which he still serves), we were talking about the nature of his duties and about the perception of some that being a General Authority is glamorous. He chuckled. “Ninety-nine percent of the ‘glamour’ that I receive in this position,” he laughed, “consists in sitting on a big chair during a weekend in April and a weekend in October.” He told me stories of having to preside over a foreign area covering seven time zones, where he was on the road several weeks each month. He recalled a room — in the best hotel of a rather large but quite third-world city far to the north — where it was so cold that he and his traveling companion, Elder Charles Didier, were afraid to go to sleep. Instead, they stayed up all night, dressed in their trench coats, slapping their arms, talking to stay awake, and sitting on a heating grill from which they imagined they could feel some slight warmth. They had to step over drunks and ascend several urine-drenched flights of stairs to get to that room.

Very glamorous.

I recall running into another General Authority whom I had known at BYU prior to his call. He was serving in the area presidency of a foreign region. Plainly, he’d been having a rough day: I asked him how he was doing. “Oh, Dan,” he replied, “the law of consecration is a check made out for an amount with a virtually unlimited number of zeros in it.”

I happen to have known a member of the Twelve — now departed — who sometimes audibly wondered how far his business career might have gone had he not been called to serve as a General Authority. It had been cut off just at the moment that he was really beginning to rise in the corporate world. He wasn’t resentful, and he was certainly committed to the Gospel, but there was still a wistful curiosity in him about what might have been.

I’ve been on various committees in Salt Lake City and I’ve seen something of the life of a General Authority, and it’s not even remotely about simply sitting around eating truffles while basking in the glow of mass reverence. Rather, it’s endless meetings, countless speeches, committees, crises, personnel searches, living out of a suitcase on extended trips around North America and abroad long after such travel has lost even a trace of novelty.

And remember: The service of an apostle, so long as he remains faithful, continues until his death. There is no retirement. And even for members of the Seventy, release as a General Authority often leads almost immediately to service as a temple president or in some other demanding capacity.

But surely presiding over a temple represents a prestige calling without much work, right? Surely it’s a restful reward for services rendered. And, for Michael Otterson, near London, no less!

Hardly.

A member of the temple presidency must be in the temple during every hour that the temple is open for ordinance work. Which means that “retired” people in temple presidencies are rising early in the morning, well before dawn, or staying late in the night, throughout each week. And administering and coordinating the work of a temple, with potentially hundreds or even sometimes thousands of ordinance workers who must be organized and properly deployed, isn’t perhaps the easiest work in the world.

Likewise, mission presidents: Speaking constantly, traveling continually, worrying about missionary apartments and sometimes other real estate issues, working with local Church units and members, organizing scores and perhaps hundreds of full-time missionaries, dealing with health problems, counseling — it’s anything but a vacation.

One of the things about the Church that most impresses me is the willingness of its members to sacrifice in the cause. Back in our home ward today, we learned that my co-teacher in the Gospel Doctrine class, who has already served as a mission president and who has been enjoying retirement, will be leaving in July with his wife to serve a Church Education System mission for eighteen months in the Republic of Cabo Verde, several hundred miles off the Atlantic coast of Africa. And, it turns out, another retired couple in the class will be leaving in a couple of weeks for eighteen months of service in South Korea. (Both couples, of course, will be serving at their own expense.)

People accept these callings because they believe and because they want to serve. Not because they want to laze around in romantic settings and do nothing.

Those who claim that such undertakings are all about luxurious living, exotic travel, and prestige may be revealing a great deal about themselves. They’re certainly saying nothing about the real nature of service in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.