What There Is to Be Done: An Invitation to Read and Listen Along

by Dan Masterton

As we get older, we often feel more and more driven to refine our understanding of ourselves and God’s ongoing invitations for us, to find more fully those places where our gifts and passions meet some need or hunger in the community and world.

For me, I’ve found conviction and clarity in my life as a husband, a father, and a stay-at-home dad, feeling deeply and wholly myself in rich ways, even amid regular fits of frustration and impatience. Within and around that, there are also streaks and strains of things that both define the backbone of these core vocations and also branch neatly into other areas of my life and of who I am.

I’ve always felt drawn to writing, but not such that I wanted to hustle it into a living. I’ve consistently wanted to write for fun, and taken the engagement or modest earnings as they come. I write to externalize, to share, to process. And the lasting motivation is to offer it as gift, mostly (I’m only human) resisting urges to alter my content or delivery from my honest reflections. (And frankly, I don’t feel like my hustle or my skill is that of a full-time writer anyways.)

One of the crosscurrents beneath that passion for writing, and my work in pastoral ministry which I continue to do part-time, is the desire to explore our faith, largely through faith-sharing discussions and witness talks. Whether working with a discussion group of young adults or a veteran adult preparing a retreat talk or a small group of teenagers on a retreat, I find myself listening more closely, processing more incisively—striving to offer the perfect follow-up question or the most careful summary—so as to help another person refine their faith as it seeks understanding. I want badly in these moments for the other person to strike upon that perhaps elusive word or phrase in their mind. I want them to be able to voice an insight that can fan away some of the fog of uncertainty and sharpen the reflection in their mind and heart.

This is something that has driven me to embrace and enjoy Christian leadership formation and especially discussion facilitation. It’s led me to get more involved in social media and communications in the Church, to help us identify and share a mission and image more clearly (which is really hard! and something I don’t feel particularly good at, at least not yet). It’s even prompted some very specific writing in my current work in vocation ministry, as we seek to resource young men exploring religious life and other discerners, striving to provide maximum relevance and accessibility and they seek God’s invitation.

Last year, that desire for articulation got splashed around with my curiosity about giving creative writing a fresh try. I wasn't sure how well it might go, so I decided to try writing quite narrowly, drawing on experiences I’ve had in pastoral ministry, serving the Church, and working in a few various school communities. Using some of the resources of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writers’ Month)—though I shudder to call my writing a “novel” or myself a “novelist”—I planned and wrote a story about a young adult working in a high school.

After a one-month draft, three passes of edits, and some lite design work, I decided I wanted to offer What There Is to Be Done, in the same vein as I’ve always offered my writing: simply by sharing it. A story of discernment and vocation, faith and prayer, community and relationship, humble service and honest ambition, I tried to create a portrait of educational ministry and real discernment. I do readily admit it’s a relatively idealized narrative, colored by my obsession with nuance, and also weighed down by my penchant for excessively long sentences.

Leaning in to the growing desire many of us have to listen rather than just read, I’m going to record the book sort of like an audiobook, but I’m going to release it one chapter at a time as a weekly podcast, called Hear Here. Alongside the podcast, I also self-published a paperback that I’d love to send out to interested readers. You can order your copy here.

To perhaps whet your appetites, I want to first share a couple excerpts from the book. First, here’s a preview of how the book starts. The story follows our main character, Ms. Theresa Acutis, a younger veteran social studies teacher with a heart for student activities and an eye on what’s next for her at work and in her family:



Finally, I wanted to share my favorite passage in the book. One of the arcs of the story follows Theresa’s discernment about her job: she loves teaching social studies, and now teaches AP US History, but she also has dreams about directing student life for the school and believes she has some big ideas that could really work. In this passage, Theresa drifts away from a faculty meeting to visualize just what student life could become when she is able to build out the house system for the school:



Starting Monday, a new chapter of Hear Here: Dan's Audiobook Podcast will be available each week via the podcast feeds on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts. I hope you'll follow along and listen and/or order a copy of the book to read in your hands!