The most addictive coffee you’ll ever taste: A lesson on smuggling sin

Police in Italy recently encountered a new kind of coffee bean after examining a suspicious shipment at Milan’s Malpensa Airport. The package originated in Columbia and was addressed to Santino D’Antonio, the fictional mob boss in the movie John Wick: Chapter 2.

The name aroused their suspicions. Upon opening the package, they found more than five hundred coffee beans that had been hollowed out, filled with roughly 130 grams of cocaine, and sealed back up with dark brown duct tape. Police then proceeded to track the package to its intended destination, where they arrested a fifty-year-old Italian man when he came to collect it.

While this bust was notable, however, it was far from the only time the Italian police have encountered creatively concealed drug shipments recently.

As CNN reports, Italy’s Guardia di Finanza captured over fifteen tons of amphetamines, worth roughly $1.12 billion, earlier this month after they were smuggled inside industrial-size paper cylinders. They believe the amphetamines were produced by ISIS in Syria.

Drug lords have an obvious motivation for trying to disguise their products as something innocuous or unworthy of note. Exposure threatens their preferred way of life, so they go to great lengths to conceal that which they would prefer others not see.

However, they’re not alone in doing so.

The vanity of smuggling sin

Most of us take a similar approach to the pet sins in our lives, i.e., the ones we know are wrong but really don’t want to give up. We’ll address the big stuff because we have to. But we’re far more hesitant to fully repent of our penchant toward gossip, holding a grudge over a past wrong, or any number of more seemingly acceptable sins.

Jesus warned against that kind of hypocrisy, though, and we would do well to heed his words: “Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops” (Luke 12:2–3).

That warning was originally given against the Pharisees, who thought themselves holy because that’s how they appeared to other people. Nearly two thousand years of Christians have seen them very differently, though. Christ shed light on their inner wickedness, and their outer veil of piety wilted under the strain.

The same will be true of us as well.

God loves us too much to allow our hidden sins to remain a hindrance to a thriving relationship with him. And if we won’t address our sins, he will.

So, the next time you’re tempted to try and smuggle your sin through the day, understand that you’re not fooling God.

And also remember that a day will come when he’ll make sure you can’t fool anyone else either.