In Psalm 10, the psalmist asks several “why?” questions of God. He describes the wicked done to him. He contrasts the arrogance of the oppressor with the seeing presence of a God who considers the grief, who defends and vindicates the helpless. When things don’t make sense to us, we feel helpless, as if we are still at the mercy of our circumstances or the person who did harm against us. We may be living with a sense of multiplied oppression – first, from the oppression itself in its original context, but now, from the way our stories have become our masters. In verse 14, the psalmist says: “the victims commit themselves to you,” in response to God’s care for our grief. In committing ourselves to God, we are invited to hold our stories in a way that disarms them, takes away the power they have over us and in us. In committing ourselves to God, we can begin to view our stories as servants rather than masters. How can we take this approach? I like to consider three themes that often haunt us in our stories, and help us discover the ways our tender and kind God invites us to steward these themes in his presence: the unclear, unknown, and unresolved.

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