Soulware™: The Pattern Behind the Person

There are thoughts that arrive like ripples in our lives that don’t arrive loudly.

They don’t crash in like a wave demanding our attention, or any action from us.

They just show up one day, settle into a corner of your mind, and keep spreading out until they reach the shores of your mind, lapping gently there, waiting for you to notice them.

This all started exactly that way.

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Let’s step back for a moment, shall we?

Often we go through life with some semblance of silence in our heads. Or at least, if there is any noise, it is the busy noise of daily life.

As the years slowly passed, these thoughts arrived, building as tiny, intricate pieces that eventually formed a mosaic—something I could finally step back from, see it take shape, and as the fog cleared, see it clearly for the first time.

In those rare, quiet moments when life finally gives you space to think about the questions that tug at your heart and trouble your mind, I began looking back over the decades of my life, and across the places I have lived, how I’ve served, and the people I’ve met, known, loved, and those who have been lost.

I grew up a Midwestern kid born in the 1960s, and coming of age in the 80s, gazing at a view of the world through the dust-specked keyhole of small-town farm life.

Like virtually everyone I knew at that time, life came with a church upbringing—Sunday best clothes, shuttling into church,

Sunday School for the kids, sermons for the adults, and then dinner with family afterward. Starting the day either by sitting with the family in the pews or with a teacher in Sunday School, hearing little snippets of a verse here and there, or maybe coloring some pages that told part of a story; either way, it was always someone’s interpretation of what it all meant.

Growing up at that time created something familiar, a comforting routine, like an old hymn you recognize immediately; yes, you know it by heart even if you don’t remember ever actually learning it.

Yes, it was comforting; it was familiar. It created a social network; it created dogmas that I took for the truth.

But looking back now, what it didn’t create in me was actual faith.

True faith, I’ve found, is something you have to build within yourself, and what a journey it has been.

So, like a lot of young people, I drifted; the dogmas I took as truth slowly faded in importance. Not gone, just no longer front and present.

Life pulled me into the self-centered, self-destructive activities of youth, then into the Army, into the world, into responsibility.

Oh, I saw the Berlin Wall fall. I served during wars. I raised a few children, moved across many states, and spent nearly three decades in federal service, trying to help hold together a world—one that doesn’t always want to stay held at the minimum, let alone a world that wanted to be saved.

But somewhere in all of that noise, something deeper began to stir.

In the late 1990s, I was out of the Army, working in the private sector, and all of a sudden I found myself being drawn back to school—or, more accurately, the Army sent me a reminder that my GI Bill was about to expire. “Use it or lose it, punk,” was the message, as I remember it.

Well, maybe it was actually more formal in tone, but to me, “use it or lose it” was what was important. The "punk" was implied.

Back then, I was living in Madison, WI. Married. Two young children not yet in school, and one son entering middle school.

I was working crazy long hours as a manager, and I needed a school program that would work in that mix. I needed a program that would fit into the life I was living, that was, in reality, "running me"—not the other way around.

I looked at a lot of programs at a lot of different schools, but I kept being drawn toward a business program at a local Lutheran college.

It wasn’t the least expensive. It didn’t have the best schedule. And some of the classes seemed, well, out of character for me to take.

But I kept coming back to it, and eventually, I enrolled.

It was there, in a Business Management and Communications program at this Lutheran College, that I studied scripture with intention for the first time.

At first, it was just a series of required classes. But something in me leaned into it.

Not to memorize it.

Not to defend, or debunk it.

But to understand it—to internalize it, to finally try and connect with it.

Over the next few years of study, I took it all in, I asked questions, I read everything I could, and over it all, I witnessed the birth of my own faith.

And I kept going.

I kept reading.

Kept expanding into connecting the texts we have today, to older texts, and many that are now excluded from the canon. Other ideas, other religions, trying to trace where the ideas first formed, and how they got to the here and now.

I was always trying to connect the dots and understand these messages, messages written by an ancient people in a time now long gone. What was the message, and what was the world they lived in like, what was going on, and what purpose was being served.

At the same time, I was diving deeper into science—a subject I’ve always loved.

But it was not science just for the sake of science. I was looking at how it all fits together and what makes sense to me here and now.

And what surprised me the most was how the more I learned about the universe—about physics, the vastness, the unimaginable scale of it all—the more my faith didn’t shrink.

It expanded.

The more I drifted from the dogma that says a tiny little area in the Middle East, on this little blue planet, is the center of divine attention, the more comforted I became in my faith.

What was growing in me was not just a sense of the scale, but also of the sense of the power over it all.

A power that could not be only bound to this small world. A tiny cosmis speck that was born and is destined to end in what is the blink of a cosmic eye when measured against the grand scope of the universe.

What my faith was expanding into was something almost incomprehensible and far beyond the story I was raised with.

As my faith expanded, it changed how I thought.

Now when I hear “God made the heavens and the Earth,” I don’t picture a small planet in a small story.

I picture the cosmos — trillions of worlds, billions of years, a design so grand it makes you feel both humbled and held.

When I hear “Let there be light,” I think of the instant of creation — the moment the universe took its first breath. The heat, the violence, the majesty of the first things coming into being.

When Scripture speaks of “days,” I don’t imagine our 24-hour cycle. I imagine cosmic time—a billion-year heartbeat in the life of a Creator who isn’t bound by clocks, or tied to the orbit of one insignificant world in one unremarkable arm, of one out of trillions of galaxies.

And when I hear “Let us make man,” I can’t help but wonder: On how many worlds?

In how many forms?

Across how many ages?

How many races have come and gone, and how many are yet to be?

These thoughts don’t pull me away from faith; they draw me deeper into it.

Because if the universe is that vast, then the fact that we exist at all — here, now, on this tiny blue speck — feels like part of a design so intricate it took billions of years to prepare this little blue stage for life’s arrival.

And finally for us to arrive, us, living, breathing atomic structures that are so elaborate that we think about, have discussions, read about, write about, that we are here, and are able to wonder about our own creation.

That thought is humbling to my core.

Now enter more science, and the things it cannot tell us.

Science can explain the atoms, the cells, and the machinery of the body.

We can account for every gram of the machine that is — or was— you or I.

We can describe what processes are happening; how much energy was created or needed.

Science tells us that atoms are recycled constantly and are never destroyed.

What makes us 'us' has been part of countless other things and will be again.

Over and over.

But science cannot explain the pattern — the 'you' that persists even as every atom is replaced over time.

You are not the same machine from just a year ago; if you live long enough, every part of you will have been replaced multiple times.

You are the 'pattern' — that word physicists use to describe the arrangement of atoms that makes up everything, “literally” everything we see, touch, and interact with.

At the end of the day, we are made of a surprisingly small number of different atoms. The arrangement that makes you 'you' is complex, orchestrated by an energy that is not just the brain.

We see this clearly when the body dies—the body keeps going until it runs out of chemical fuel for energy.

Yes, science can explain why the body keeps working for minutes or hours after death — the stomach still digesting, enzymes still doing their job, cells still mobilizing to repair the brain, genes dormant since the womb suddenly activating in a last attempt to save the machine.

The machine does not know it is all futile; the presence is gone,

but the machine doesn’t know it, so it keeps trying to follow the program.

But the conductor has left the symphony.

No, science cannot explain the spark that makes you 'you'.

For many, this is the soul — but that word can sound static, unchanging, issued, locked in.

It can seem like something basic, peripheral in our lives, just a term we read about, hear about in sermons, or see in the movies. We don't tend to think of it as the ultimate driver of the pattern that is you.

And yet everything in life tells us there is change. I’ve seen it countless times. Deep internal resets, the kind that we see a different person come out of the other side.

People can and do change.

So, I started thinking about this: if this inner presence is dynamic, evolving, capable of growth—then maybe it’s not a fixed soul in the old sense I had grown up with.

Not something issued at conception or birth, not something that has a preordained path, or ending as I was taught.

Maybe it’s more like a form of Soulware.

Soulware, the operating system behind the hardware.

This is the pattern that not only holds us together, it is the presence that animates the machine.

The grand conductor of the complex series of events we call our lives.

The part of us that remembers, chooses, knows anger, pain, forgives, wonders, and loves.

And maybe the reason I’m writing about this now—after a lifetime of service, faith, family, and trying to give back—is that I’ve come to believe something simple:

If the universe took billions of years to make us, then our lives are not accidents.

They are invitations.

Invitations to grow.

To change.

To update the parts of ourselves that no longer serve us.

To refine the pattern that makes us who we are.

Maybe repentance is just a reboot.

Maybe growth is an update.

Maybe forgiveness is a patch.

Maybe the soul is something we tend to, nurture, and renew.

And maybe — just maybe — the miracle isn’t that we exist here on this fragile little blue world.

Maybe it’s that we get to decide who we become, that we can be masters of the system and control the updates while our Soulware is still running.

My faith has deepened over this journey and evolved into the belief that I can and do have power over the final output of this program, which is my life.

I write this Knowing how truly blessed I am!

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