How could a loving God allow thousands of innocent infants to die in the tsunami? Doesn't he care? Doesn't he see? This is no doubt a very difficult question to answer. Perhaps we can try to understand somewhat why God works in the way he does when we understand the sacredness of free choice. When God created man, he created man to be free. For only a free human being can voluntarily choose to love and worship him. Man without choice is essentially a soulless robot. However with this free choice came the possibility that man may not choose God, that man may sin. As God foreknew, man did sin, in the Garden of Eden.
Here is the crux of the matter. With free choice comes moral responsibility. The wages of sin is always death. You could say God created man knowing that some would not choose him and go to hell. Why would a loving God live with that possibility? Because the sanctity and sacredness of free choice demanded that. Free choice that was necessary for us to exist as true, morally independent and free human beings. And we might make conjecture that creation of man was a superior option than no creation at all even though some might go to hell in the process. We might then ask why doesn't God tamper the consequences of the wrong choices we make? Sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn’t. If he did so every time, nobody would go to hell even if they rejected him. You see, free choice necessitates consequences of that choice without which the free choice would be meaningless and the choice itself illusory. If we were to be protected from the consequences of our choice, then there would be no avenue for moral responsibility. God in his wisdom has therefore seen it fit that as morally free beings, we face the consequences of our moral decisions.
How does this apply to the situation like a major calamity? The fact of a decaying creation is the consequences of sin. Creation is in bondage to decay because of Eden. The natural order of things are progressively falling apart. This is the consequence of the morally free choice of our forefathers, the indirect consequence of sin, both in our lives and the lives of our forefathers. God does not always mitigate the evil or tragic consequences that ensue because to do so would remove any avenue for moral responsibility and render the freedom of choice itself illusory. If God were to do so, taken to its extreme, nobody on earth would die, nobody on earth would suffer and nobody on earth would go to hell. Then our decisions simply would not matter. Our freedom of choice rendered farcical.
As to why God saved one child from the waves but allowed another to drown, we will never know. What loving father would allow his son to die? The God we know would. He did, some 2000 years ago on the Cross. To all who were looking on that Calvary morning, the cross was foolishness. Unexplainable foolishness. A man in his prime, full of potential, full of the anointing, yet a life wasted after 2.5 short years of ministry. To the Jews, the cross was an offense and it still is to them today. To the Greeks, the cross was foolishness. Yet the cross is to us the wisdom of God and the power of God. Some things we can only know with the benefit of hindsight. Every dying child, every drown child, every fibre of our being screams and demands to know why? For it violates everything we see as fair and just and kind. But then we survey the wondrous Cross, on which the King of Glory died. How could it be? As I ponder the Cross, and all its seeming insanity and contradictions and illogicality, disbelief gives way to faith, and confusion to hope. For I can never understand enough of God to "darken His counsel with words without knowledge". I can never understand. I can only trust.