Daymon Smith - Blessings and Agency

We have no reason to assume our blessings have come of our own righteousness. This means there is no compulsion nor bribery which leads to righteousness, and no measuring worth doing; for you’ll find that the wicked are often blessed equally, if not in profusion, should you compare how much rain one has received with that sent upon another. If there is no material reason for righteousness, nor fear of wickedness because God will smite you with a plague, the only reason to do good, it seems to me, is because one prefers that to doing evil. And so we really are free to act.

-Daymon Smith, "Like Unto = Evil"

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

"I know that evil exists. I think it is not selective but only opportunistic."

-Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason (pg. 97)

"The Ba'al Shem Tov...taught them that the purpose of man is to make his life holy--every aspect of his life: eating, drinking, praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only beause we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly. Evil is like a hard shell. Within this shell is the spark of God, is goodness. How do we penetrate the shell? By sincere and honest prayer, by being happy and by loving all people...no man is so sinful that he cannot be purified by love and understanding."

-Chaim Potok, The Chosen (pg. 110)