Okay, this is from an astrophysics major here:
1. Black holes don't suck things in anymore than a planet or a star would. It's not like they just sit there and suck up space or something. Treat them just as you would any other massive object like a planet, star, or person, but with stronger gravity. You can orbit a black hole indefinitely with no problems just as the earth can orbit the sun. In fact, if all you did was compress the sun down to a small enough radius instantaneously and turned it into a black hole the earth's orbit wouldn't change. We'd all die cause we weren't getting any light/heat anymore, but our frozen corpses would still be circling the sun like we are now.
2. There most certainly is some gravitational lensing effects going on there, but only for the stars which are behind the black hole as viewed from our perspective. This effect would make it seem as though the star was farther from our line of sight to the black hole than it really was though.
3. What's so confusing about the stars' motions? They're random because they interact with each other as well as with the black hole. If you've ever seen a 3-body gravitational simulation you know how chaotic 3 bodies can be... Now imagine 10.