There’s a story about an elephant that after washing himself in a river, sees a pig walking up the road. Since the pig is covered with mud and dirt, the elephant moves out of the path to let him pass. The pig the next day was bragging to his friends how powerful he was, “even the elephant gets out of the way when I come up the road!”
Of course the Elephant didn’t move because the pig was stronger….
He moved because encountering the pig would make him filthy, needing to wash again.
That story is symbolic of life because it’s often better to be clean than to be right. Applying that spiritually, there are times we like the elephant give up our rights to keep our testimony and integrity pure.
Recently a water pipe at Church burst. We decided instead of replacing all of the piping (which wasn’t necessary) to reconnect the part that had broken to the other pipes with plastic water pipe (which was easier to replace).
This required putting a pipe behind a building that we had built on a wall. The wall was built by us, the building was built by us, and we had rebuilt part of the wall in 2021. So we had every right to put a pipe there.
Unfortunately the neighbor on the other side of the wall became very angry saying we had no right to put a pipe on her side of the wall. Now she was was wrong about this, but absolutely refused to let us do it.
At this point I had a choice
Do we put the pipe behind the wall and deal with the consequences?
Or do we find another way?
There are situations where we must stand and fight, but honestly a water pipe isn’t one of those situations. So instead we made a hole in both sides of the building, and led the new pipe through it.
Satan loves to create conflict and drama in life that can cause us to compromise our testimony. Fighting over that water pipe (though we had a right to put it there) wasn’t worth the hit my public testimony would take.
It is usually better to step aside and keep our testimony clean than play with the pigs.
Johnhwilburn.com 
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