if God loves us, why does He allow us to hurt?

This ties into the "problem of evil" question in the last post. If God loves us, why does He allow us to go through pain, suffering, emotional hurt, why does He allow bad people to stay in power. If God loves us, why...? This question has mostly to do with the character of God: if God loves... We have to figure out first what really is love? We've always heard the distinction between love and lust, but here's an easy way to think of it...

Love searches and strives for the good of it's object....even for the best of its object if possible.
Lust strives only for the self... to satisfy the self. For example: lust of power, lust of another, lust for money... me me me.

When we sin or a person hurts another it absolutely hurts God, but still He endures it. (We rarely think about how sin affects God because we don't see it, we don't hear it. He loves us sooo much that whatever pain we inflict on others or whatever pain others inflict on us, He feels it just as intensely as we do. But we have to remember, God loves them as much as He loves us.) He wants us to come under His wings, but because He loves us, He won't force us to. And with the people who are inflicting pain, God has chosen to not cross over their free will, but instead aims to use it to bring out an even greater good from it than what we can see today.

Let's take an example... the one Pastor Chad talked about a few weeks ago. A boy was raped by a man many years ago. Later the boy grew up, dealt with the pain, and rising above of the hurt he turned to God. Later a lonely old man in a retirement center confessed to the horrible crime and the younger man who was a boy found out about the confession somehow. He went to the retirement center, met the old man who begged for forgiveness, forgave the old man, and told the old man about Christ.

For perhaps 30 or 40 years, the man who was the boy may have continuially asked, "God, why did you allow that to happen?" However, when the old man gave up his life for Christ, I bet it all made sense then. That may have been one of the only ways to get the man to turn his life around and live for Christ. What I'm trying to say is that sometimes life stinks. Why? Because sin has entered the world. We may not know all the reasons for why the world is this way... but we do know that God is infinitely intelligent and truly loves us, and we have to sometimes simply trust that His ways are higher than our ways.

People will sometimes say, "If I were God, I would do _______." ... or set up the world this way or that.... or wouldn't do _______. However, we're not as intelligent as God. He's already thought of every possible game-plan for His ultimate goal (which I think the goal is for us to freely choose and love Him and have a strong, well-developed character... not forced, not robots) and out of every possible world this is the best one for accomplishing those goals.

As many people have said, God has reasons, but we may not know all of them. This is where trust comes into play, and we have to look for the good in all things instead of being swallowed up in the bad.

Well... this is a tough topic, but what do you think? Anything you'd like to add or ask about? (If you want, you can even play devil's advocate ;) )