Sokreaksa Himm

Quick Facts

• Role: Cambodian survivor of the Khmer Rouge whose life becomes the book’s most extreme case study in radical forgiveness
• First appearance: Chapter 23, as presented by Brant Hansen
• Setting and context: Battambang, Cambodia; 1977 massacre and its aftermath
• Key relationships: his murdered family; the men who killed them; Jesus as the catalyst for his transformation
• Note: No physical description is given; the narrative centers on his interior life—trauma, rage, faith, and release

Who They Are

Bold, unsentimental, and painfully specific, the story of Sokreaksa Himm distills the book’s thesis into a single human life: a teenager left for dead in a mass grave who spends years plotting revenge, then chooses to track down his family’s killers for one purpose—to forgive them. Himm isn’t offered as a saint immune to anger; he’s a man who admits to elaborate revenge fantasies and then abandons them when his new faith demands an entirely different path. His life functions as a living argument for The Choice to Be Unoffendable and the disarming power of Grace and Forgiveness: if forgiveness can reach this atrocity, no ordinary offense stands outside its reach.

Personality & Traits

Himm’s defining qualities come into focus against catastrophic loss. The book shows him first as a wounded avenger, then as a man disciplined by faith into a counterintuitive mercy. His traits matter because they chart the inner battle between the psychological logic of trauma and the theological logic of forgiveness.

• Vengeful but honest: He admits to “elaborate fantasies” of torturing his family’s killers again and again (Chapter 23), a candor that makes his later forgiveness credible rather than naïve.
• Resilient: Surviving a mass beating, burial, and escape as a fourteen-year-old shows a will to live that later becomes a will to forgive.
• Spiritually perceptive: Upon becoming a follower of Jesus, he recognizes that rage and discipleship cannot coexist—he “couldn’t be a believer in Jesus and remain angry with his family’s killers” (Chapter 23).
• Profoundly forgiving: He seeks out perpetrators face-to-face, extending forgiveness in public, transforming personal healing into a communal witness.
• Self-aware: He diagnoses bitterness as soul-destroying and refuses to let it define the rest of his life.

Character Journey

Himm’s arc runs from trauma to intention to transformation. In 1977, as a teenager, he watches his family beaten to death with farm tools, is left for dead, and climbs out of a mass grave. The next years harden into a vow: find the killers, take revenge, and quiet the pain by mirroring it. Conversion disrupts this trajectory. Confronted by the demands of his new faith, he concludes that clinging to anger will cost him his soul. Letting go is not emotional amnesia but a deliberate surrender of what feels like a “right” to rage. The culmination is active forgiveness: locating two of the men and, in front of villagers who expect retribution, shaking their hands and offering mercy. The revenge story he’d written for himself is replaced by a different script—one that frees him from bitterness and embodies the book’s thesis.

Key Relationships

• The killers: This is the defining antagonism of Himm’s life—first the source of his vow, then the object of his mercy. By confronting them publicly, he reframes power: not by inflicting symmetrical harm, but by refusing to be ruled by it. Their shock, and the villagers’ surprise, underscore how forgiveness violates communal expectations shaped by fear and memory.
• His family: Their murder is the wound that structures his adolescence and early adulthood. Loving them first through rage, he eventually honors them through forgiveness—choosing a future in which their memory no longer chains him to retaliatory violence.
• Jesus: Himm’s conversion reorients his moral universe. The incompatibility he perceives between Christian discipleship and cherished hatred becomes the hinge of his transformation, turning personal survival into spiritual freedom.
• Brant Hansen: As narrator, Hansen curates Himm’s story in Chapter 23 not to sensationalize trauma but to test the book’s claim at its hardest edge. Himm’s example functions as Hansen’s answer to the objection “But what about extreme injustice?”

Defining Moments

Himm’s life turns on scenes where internal conviction collides with public action.

• The massacre (1977, age fourteen): He witnesses his family beaten with machetes and hoes, is buried in a mass grave, and survives (Chapter 23). Why it matters: Establishes the scale of harm—making any later forgiveness neither easy nor abstract, but morally costly.
• The vow of vengeance: Years of planning and fantasy center on locating and killing the perpetrators (Chapter 23). Why it matters: Revenge becomes his organizing purpose, showing how trauma can offer clarity that is ultimately corrosive.
• Spiritual realization: After conversion, he judges his anger “simply incompatible” with Jesus’s commands (Chapter 23). Why it matters: This is the pivot from psychology to theology—he abandons the script that once sustained him.
• The public forgiveness: He finds two perpetrators and, to the villagers’ surprise, shakes their hands and forgives them (Chapter 23). Why it matters: Forgiveness becomes embodied and communal; by refusing retribution, he redraws the moral map for everyone watching.

Essential Quotes

• “For years I cultivated elaborate fantasies in which I tortured and murdered the killers again and again, projecting all my rage and pain I bottled inside myself in my plans for what I would do to the men when I found them. I realized that I would never know true peace until I had dealt with this as well. I had to find a way of forgiving them, before the bitterness inside destroyed me.” This passage compresses his entire arc: the honesty about vengeance, the insight that revenge cannot heal, and the decisive turn toward forgiveness as survival. It frames forgiveness not as weakness but as the only path to peace.

• “I eventually found two of the men involved in my family’s deaths, in the very village and among the very people they terrorized over two decades before. Initially on hearing that I wanted to meet the men to forgive them, many people thought that my plan was just another attempt to locate the men so that I could take my revenge. To the surprise of the men and most of the villagers, I shook hands with the two men and forgave them.” The scene relocates forgiveness from the private interior to a public square. By subverting communal expectations of vengeance, Himm’s act exposes forgiveness as a countercultural power, not a retreat.

• “[He] couldn’t be a believer in Jesus and remain angry with his family’s killers.” (Chapter 23) This distilled conviction is the engine of his transformation. It clarifies the cost of discipleship: releasing even “righteous anger” to gain the freedom bitterness could never deliver.