What Should We Do Today?

I walked into my favorite coffee shop and the first thing I saw was a headline that read, "Maybe 10,000 Dead". I thought, "This is terrible." This coming after a discussion with a friend about the book of Job. It all made me feel awfully self-centered because if it is true that 10,000 Japanese folks were killed, that means that there are perhaps scores of thousands of people hurting in Japan today. I am only one person here in the United States, and unless I am ridiculously self-conscious I'm doing pretty good. (Truth be told as a "Westerner" I am almost definitely too self-conscious already.) And now the more I write the more this inwardness; this inward approach to the whole topic sickens me, as if what is going on in Japan is not really happen, as if the earthquake is not real. There is no reason for me to be any less shaken in my faith about the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear explosions, than if something tragic happened in my personal life. But to take it a step further, and not to be overly cynical (trust me this post is going somewhere), all of these people, and all of us, are heading toward the same fate in the end. Given, most of us may not lose so much all at once as have many people in Japan this morning, (or it would be evening for them)but we will all lose. It's only normal for these things to affect our faith, if we have any. My main point so far is to say, if we're willing to think about it deeply, and it usually takes these catastrophes to make us think deeply about it, the whole thing can seem so absolutely absurd, but at the end of the day, regardless of the fact that it's unnatural to be as broken about the Japan earthquake, as the Japanese themselves, and certainly to some degree it would inappropriate and insensitive to purport to be; the other side of the coin is that we share a common humanity with them, a common experience, though perhaps variant in degree, of living in a world of suffering with a conscious that whispers to us that it ought not be so. To put the questions in blunt terms; "Given these sorts of "natural" disasters, why believe in God? And why should it take a personal tragedy to make us ask the question?
On one hand there is no easy way to handle it, and on the other, to try and explain in with abstract words seems both insensitive and impossible. But I have always said that faith exists for such a time as this. I don't believe this to be a comfort, nor the answer that anyone wants to hear, but I do believe its the truth, and the only thing I can say. No, there's one more thing I can say. People of the Christian faith believe that God became a man and suffered as a man, and that this is the universal atoning sacrifice for sin, but also that we now know that we have a God who knows what's it's like to suffer as a human, and now we can come to Him on terms as a human. We can say to God, "Why?!" We can explain how absurd this all seems. And we know that rarely is it the case that God answers our questions directly, rarely telling us what we want to hear, but always telling us what we need to hear, and to me He seems to be saying, "Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect" How is God perfect? How did He fulfill all things? He shared in suffering. His incarnation and crucifixion were not only the end and climax of our Christian story, but also the beginning. He died as our Savior, finally, but also as our example for eternity. I think it would be very pious but finally un-Christian of us to continue to speak eloquent thoughts about God's love to one another, and never show God's love. Recall James , where James tells us that faith without works is dead faith, and to be doers of the word, not merely hearers. So what should we today?