Stokes Sounds Off: 04/15/18

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Sunday, April 15, 2018

Report on April 2018 General Conference Predictions

Hello again, everyone! It took me a while to do so, but yesterday, I finally had a chance to run some numbers and figure out how I did with my predictions for the April 2018 General Conference. Because of all of the unexpected things that occurred during that conference, even though I allowed myself a margin of error, as I indicated I would do, my calculations showed 54% accuracy this go-round.

That is only slightly less than the 60-80% range within which those usually fall, which, given all the unexpected things that occurred (such as President Nelson giving 5 total addresses during the last 3 sessions of the conference, the calling of the new apostles, 5 members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles speaking in the last session, the entire First Presidency speaking during the Sunday Morning Session, etc.) is not too bad.

It will be interesting, to be sure, to see what unfolds with the next few conferences. I have begun the preliminary work of putting my predictions together for the October 2018 General Conference, which I may post within the next 3 months or so. In the meantime, I have a bunch of other projects underway, some of which will be posted here at some point.

That does it for this post. Any and all comments are, as always, welcome and appreciated. Thank you for the privilege of your time. Until my next post. I wish each one of you all the best and pray that the Lord will bless you all in everything you do.

Update Noted on the Memphis Tennessee Temple Renovation Process

Hello again, everyone! With the many temple updates I provided yesterday, I did not anticipate having additional news in that regard to post today. I was therefore pleased a short while ago to discover that many sources I have available for temple news have shared an update on the Memphis Tennessee Temple renovation process.

As some of you might recall, the last update I posted for that temple showed that structural framing had been completed for the steeple. The new information of which I became aware today notes that sheathing plywood has been attached to the temple's exterior, while additional framing is being added to the steeple of this temple.

It was good to hear of the progress that has been made on that temple. I have previously noted that many of the sources I use for the reports I share here moved the Oklahoma City Oklahoma Temple ahead of this one in terms of its' likely future completion time-frame. As I have also observed, we have 3 temples being renovated (the two mentioned in this paragraph and the Frankfurt Germany Temple) and 2 new temples currently under construction (in Kinshasa DR Congo and Fortaleza Brazil) that are all anticipated to be completed in the early-to-middle part of next year.

At the moment, the 5 temples mentioned above could be considered as interchangeable in terms of their likely order of completion. What will certainly be interesting to see is if the Church will opt to schedule any of these for dedication or rededication prior to the already-scheduled dedication for the Rome Italy Temple in mid-March. I haven't done the research yet to verify this, but I seem to recall the Church scheduling the dedication of one temple prior to the previously-announced dedication of another temple.

If it turns out that all of these 5 temples have dedications or rededications set after the Rome dedication concludes, then some of those 5 events may occur more towards the latter half of the year than the first half of it. It will be interesting to see how the Church handles all of that, since 2019 is, by all accounts, shaping up to be full of temple events.

Whatever might occur in that regard, you can count on my monitoring these developments as they occur, and that I will be passing those along to you all as I am able to do so. That does it for this post. Any and all comments are, as always, welcome and appreciated. Thank you for the privilege of your time. Until my next post, I wish each one of you all the best and pray that the Lord will bless you all in everything you do.