How retracing a dark route from history led a family to pray for the nation and the next generation of leaders

Written By: Rachel Dalland
IWU alum Rev. Jeff Eckart (’93) and his family embarked on a journey of prayer while retracing a dark route from our nation’s history. This walk was a journey where hurt and healing collided, and disappointment and hope found space to co-exist.

The Eckart family walked the Trail of Death, a march that forcibly pushed 859 members of the Potawatomi Nation from their home in Indiana on a 61-day, 680-mile march to Kansas, resulting in 41 Potawatomi deaths in 1838.

Eckart learned about the route from Rev. Keith Drury, a well-known religion professor at IWU who walked the entire route and kept a journal of his adventures as he walked. Drury has authored Meditations for Christians along the Trail of Death, a book combining the Potawatomi story with his own journal reflections on religion from his 62-day journey.

According to historians, Indiana officials wanted to rid the state of the Potawatomi members from land sold by tribal members to the U.S. government for $1 an acre. The Indiana militia was charged with removing holdouts refusing to leave their ancestral lands.

When they arrived in Kansas in November, only 817 Potawatomi were still alive and the 41 marchers who died in harsh conditions, mostly children and the elderly, were buried along the route in unmarked graves.

Eckart set out on this 21-day journey as a personal journey of sorrow and repentance. “The thing that God had led me to and made it clear on this trip is that we need to pray for healing for our country and this generation of students,” he said. “Learning from dark moments like this can help us avoid this in the future. I am passionate about handing off a better world to future generations.”

Eckart is the founder and director of a national youth ministry group, Never the Same, based in Grand Rapids, Mich. Its mission is to disciple the next generation. Originally, Eckart’s journey would end in La Cygne, Kan., in time for “Claim Your Campus,” an event he envisioned to draw 100,000 students on July 4. It promoted prayer groups in schools.

“As a man of faith, it just seemed that God was doing something and I felt like a connection between a prayer walk along the Trail of Death and our event was necessary,” Eckart said. “The experience was humbling. I realized how dependent I am on God and those He’s put in my life.” Due to COVID-19, the event was turned into a participatory live-stream event, where thousands of students and their families traveled to their schools to pray for different generations in what was an amazing moment of multi-generational unity for the church.

“It was amazing to see generations interact with each other in prayer,” Eckart said. “We called upon students to pray for the nation, and we called upon adults to pray for the healing of this next generation.”

Disappointed that the event had to be altered, he trusted in God’s faithfulness.

“We’re all losing something during this time, but God is still faithful in the midst of loss. The Trail of Death is an entire episode of our history that is terrible and awful, people living in disappointment,” he explained.

“Disappointment is real and we shouldn’t ignore it, but our faith is really important and God is faithful.”

Praying and meditating over Jeremiah 32:17-19 during his journey, Eckart felt the Trail of Death journey was a tangible representation and reminder of the sins of past generations.

“With the current racial injustice and tension in our nation, this generation is in many ways paying for the punishment of past generations’ sins, as Jeremiah talks about,” he said. “There’s a lot of anger and opinions and divisiveness that we are all experiencing in some way right now. I spent the journey praying for our nation, my personal disappointments, and this next generation.”

Eckart began this prayer journey by himself on June 8, 2020, in Plymouth, Ind., eventually being joined by his wife and their three daughters during the second week of his walk to finish the route as a family. The Eckart family was also joined by several others in prayer during the third and final week of the journey.

“During my journey, God spoke to me deeply that as a believer I need to be a peacemaker and listen to understand,” he added. “He increased my capacity to listen and love other people. We need to have grace for one another.”