Like the air we breathe, most Americans assume our extraordinary freedoms will always be in abundant supply. It's only when those freedoms are threatened or when we are otherwise enlightened to the fact that many in our world live and die never knowing the blessings of liberty, that our appreciation for it grows. In this collection of short essays, seven Americans write about events in their lives that resulted in a deeper appreciation of freedom.

(AgapePress) - Twenty years ago, pursuing a dream of academic excellence and artistic mastery, I left my homeland in communist Eastern Europe and arrived in the U.S. wide-eyed and anxious. What I found was immeasurably greater than all my dreams combined. I found American freedoms, the most precious one of which I didn't even know one needed -- the freedom to know and worship God.

For, where I came from, the spiritually lethal mixture of humanism and socialism in our upbringing and education rendered God irrelevant. By the time the Party's educational arm was through with us, atheism had set so deeply in our minds that it became the only acceptable and logical view of the world.

Led by my government, my teachers, even by my parents, I walked the wide path to the dark gates of eternal separation from my Maker. In just my lifetime, I have seen whole generations utterly lost to the deadly toxins of atheism, when the knowledge of the Creator became a heavily guarded intellectual commodity. I have seen my once proud and prosperous, centuries-old Christian nation lose the freedom of the knowledge of the Divine, disintegrate and lower itself into the chaos of one of the most violent civil wars in European history. Blood flowed like rivers, human life became cheaper than candy, and hope was nowhere to be found. For, ultimately, that's what humanity is, void of the knowledge of God -- hopeless and self-destructive.

How blessed are we, living here in this land of freedoms. Because of the divinely inspired wisdom and faithfulness of the founding fathers we are still surrounded by the freely imparted knowledge of the Almighty Creator of the universe, who in His love for us came to earth as a humble man in Galilee, and gave up His life for you and for me. Indeed, as that old song says, "America, America, God shed His grace on thee." Let us never take it for granted.