If God, like us, is susceptible to immense pain, He is, like us, the greater in His capacity for happiness.  The presence of such pain serves the larger purposes of God's master plan, which is to maximize the human capacity for joy, or in other words, "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man."  He can no more foster those ends in the absence of suffering and evil than one could find the traction to run or the breath to sing in the vacuum of space. God does not instigate pain or suffering, but He can weave it into his purposes.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 33