If God is a loving God, why does He allow us to suffer? What is the purpose of our pain? When a child touches a hot stove, it burns his finger, and pain receptors send a signal to the brain. He gets the message pretty quickly: That hurts! Don’t do that anymore! In this case, the purpose of pain is to warn away from doing things that harm our body. Yet there are many other kinds of pain, as we’ve already seen. Some kinds of pain we could not possibly anticipate or prevent: an attack by a crazed gunman;