"Bill D, you studied Whitehead - ....."

yep. And Whitehead is not easy to summarize.

You ask the question, Joe.."What if God is somehow the center, the essence of the process? "
For Whitehead, "... the center, the essence of the process.." is a pretty arcane concept called an "actual entity", which seems to be something like the current idea of 'quarks'..only smaller.
The way Whitehead accounts for 'free will' is that at certain points, "actual entities" have options...or can be subject to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle...something like that. Thus, the 'process' (for Whitehead) is not rigidly determined by only physical laws. In several hundred pages, he tries to show how "Reality" is partly determined by a "Process" which has elements of 'freedom' AS part of its fundamental definition.

(gee..its been ages since I tried to write this stuff precisely!)

In any case, although 'the process' seems to have a component which partakes of some sort of 'variable possibility' (my term...not Whitehead's), the problem with your question would be in the formulation. Rather than "What if God is the....", we would have to ask "can we call this component (of reality) 'God'?".
   Of course, 'we' do...but the very language is loaded with imagery and preconceptions...and Whitehead carefully avoids that sort of label. My Master's thesis was to have claimed that only a metaphysics such as in Whitehead could even logically resolve the Free Will/Determinism controversy...but would stop short of claiming that it did actually resolve it.

   For me, just saying "What if God is...X..or Y...or Z" is loaded with assumptions...that there is a god, and that we merely need to figure out how to visualize him/it and refer to him/it.
(remember that judge in Alabama who kept insisting that he ought to be free "to acknowledge God" by putting the 10 Commandments in public
view? No one seemed to be able to explain to him that there were folks who didn't appreciate having 'God' as a given in a society which states that religion is optional.)

so...there I go. Did I came anywhere near answering what you asked?