Kabbalah says there's no point in suffering... That pain is not needed for spiritual evolution. I would say that suffering is not the point, or even the mean that God wants us to go through the process. Suffering is more like a reaction, a manifestation into reality that we are not living the life we were supposed to, or a lack of joy for being away of what we truly desire or are seeking. There is suffering at different levels - physical, emotional, psychological - and sometimes it is impossibe at all to avoid or prevent it, and it has more or less direct consequences in our lives. I would not say that pain teaches us, it warns us, awakes us, but we have to know how not to let it consume us, and that might be a hard task sometimes. Could it be a tool used by God to teach us, change us somehow?... I don't know, but I hope He is aware of the suffering that millions of innocent people are going through...