Indiana Pastor Posts 1,000 Days of Devotions

In mid-March 2025, Art DeBruyn, pastor of Center Grove Church, a Christian Reformed Congregation in Greenwood, Ind., is almost a quarter way through 1,000 days of devotions—daily posts with reflections on Scripture and an accompanying photo from his personal collection. Center Grove re-posts the writings too, sharing the project that grew out of two earlier books and DeBruyn’s daily habit of practicing Spanish with the language-learning app Duolingo.

DeBruyn made use of the app after a few trips to Spanish-speaking countries, including walking portions of the Camino de Santiago (175 miles of the 500-mile-long trail) in 2017 and 2022. When he reached 1,248 days of consecutive Spanish practice he wondered about putting daily effort in another direction: sharing devotions. He’d done shorter stints of devotion sharing before, during two summer preaching series at Center Grove including through the book of Romans in 2021 and 1 Corinthians in 2022. Those he turned into books, The Redeeming Road and Always Better Together.

For the 1,000 days of devotions he’s drawing on 18 years of sermons, keeping tabs in a spreadsheet so he doesn’t reference the same sermon twice over the course of two and three-quarters years. He posted the first of his 1,000 devotions Aug. 5, 2024.

“Even when (I) use the same Scriptures, (there’s) always something new,” DeBruyn said. “Every time I go back to an old sermon, it's a trip back to see development and transformation.”

DeBruyn became a minister after working first as a lawyer, leaving his job as an attorney after many rejections of God’s calling. Having been “raised as an evangelical atheist,” with parents who were Dutch immigrants to Grand Rapids, Mich., affected by experiences of growing up in occupied territory during World War II, DeBruyn said, “Christ tracked me down” at age 37. Of making sense of life, DeBruyn said, “God doesn’t reveal the big picture, I don’t think we can handle the big picture.”

The photos DeBruyn uses to accompany his reflections come from his personal collection—often including nature and various landscapes from travel. “It's looking back at memories,” he said, trying to find the perfect photo that visually expresses what he’s conveying in words.

DeBruyn expects to post the final devotion May 3, 2027, according to his spreadsheet tracker. He doesn’t yet know what he might do after that. “If there is a plan, it hasn’t been revealed to me,” he said.