Soulware™: The Pattern Behind the Person

There are thoughts that don’t arrive loudly.

They don’t crash in or demand attention.

They just show up one day, settle into a corner of your mind, and wait for you to notice them.

This one started that way.

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Some people go through life with some semblance of silence in their heads. Or at least if there is noise, it is the noise of daily life.

It came to me slowly, building as tiny, intricate pieces that eventually formed a mosaic — something I could finally step back from and see clearly.

It’s taken shape over the years I’ve lived, across the places I’ve served, with the people I’ve loved.

It formed 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 grew up a Midwestern kid in the 1960s, seeing life only through the keyhole of middle America.

Like most of us then, life came with a church upbringing — Sunday best clothes, dinner with family afterward.

Starting the day sitting with the family in the pews, hearing little snippets of a verse and someone’s interpretation of what it all means.

It created something familiar, a comforting routine, like an old hymn you know by heart even if you don’t remember learning it.

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.

So, like a lot of young people, I drifted. Life pulled me into the Army, into the world, into responsibility.

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

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

In the late 1990s, I found myself drawn back to school — or, more accurately, the Army reminded me my GI Bill was about to expire.

“Use it or lose it, punk,” was the message, as I remember it.

Well maybe it was more formal in tone, but with the same feel.

At the time, 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 needed a program that would work.

I needed a program that would fit into a life that was, in reality, "running me" — not the other way around.

I looked at a lot of programs, but I kept being pulled toward one at a 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, 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 it.

But to understand it — to finally connect with it.

Over those next few years of study, I saw the birth of my own faith.

And I kept going.

I kept reading.

Kept expanding into connecting texts, older and now excluded texts.

Always trying to connect the dots and understand the messages from a people in a time now long gone.

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

And what surprised me 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 of this little blue planet being the center of divine attention, the more comforted I became in my faith.

What grew in me was a sense of scale, of power not bound to this small world destined to end in the blink of a cosmic eye.

Something almost incomprehensible and far beyond the story I was raised with.

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.

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 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 the stage for life’s arrival.

For us, for atomic structures so elaborate that we can wonder about our own creation.

That thought is humbling to my core.

Now enter science.

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.

We can describe what processes happened; 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, not the driver of the pattern.

And yet everything in life tells us we can change. I’ve seen it countless times.

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.

Maybe it’s more like Soulware.

The operating system behind the hardware.

The pattern that holds us together.

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, 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 can tend to, nurture, and renew.

And maybe — just maybe — the miracle isn’t that we exist.

It’s that we get to decide who we become while our Soulware is still running the program of our life.

I write this Knowing how truly blessed I am!

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