Why does God allow suffering

I read an article on the BBC web site about suffering, a topic that is at the fore after Haiti and the thousands who have died. I read the comments after the article and although the 6 different comments don't necessarily reflect 1/6 of the population each, it is worrying and sad when you read what people think about it. Sad that some people think God doesn't care, sad that people duck the issue and can only say things like, "we can only pray", "there are no answers" and worrying that even people who seem to be Christians who really don't understand the relationship between sin and suffering.
Sure, our sins can cause direct effects. We all know if we drink and drive then we might cause harm to somebody, if we don't govern our countries or share our wealth then some people are much more prone to suffer the effects of 'natural' disasters but I believe it goes deeper than that.
God loves us, the Bible is about as blunt about this fact as it could be. If God didn't care, we wouldn't even be here, He wouldn't need to tolerate our ignorance and misbehaviour. I think therefore to tally suffering with a loving God, we need look no further than Genesis 3 where God says to Adam, "because you sinned, cursed is the ground because of you". I like the NIV version because it is clear that God didn't curse the ground as a punishment as it appears in some versions but actually the effect of our corporate sin is that the very physical world we live in suffers as a result of our sin. This is not un-theological, you must remember that although God is the Landlord, He gave us the tenancy of the world. If we decide that we do not need God either individually or corporately then His sustaining power, His life is removed from the areas we have authority over (people and physical things) and the result is that we die and it dies.
I think it is imperative that Christians understand this link. How can we say we believe in a loving God but not understand or explain why people suffer? We need to see that death is not a punishment from a malevolant God but a result of our choice to remove Him from our life.
I have seen examples of people who give their lives to God and they are blessed in different ways, other people or countries that are Godless suffer. It is not always black and white because our lives overlap and the effects of our sins can be felt in many different ways but the gospel is that God wants to restore His life to us and He has done this through His son Jesus that when we truly see our current standing, we will choose to accept God and He can then restore us once again and also forgive us our 'trespasses' that we spend so much of our life doing!

My Tax Return (Again)

I had to ring the helpdesk today to get some help. I asked what my unique tax reference was and she couldn't tell me (not sure whether she couldn't or wasn't allowed to) which was not helpful. She said that the unique tax reference was a UTR number (so she was saying that the UTR number was a UTR number) which of course was no help at all.
She then said that the problem was my userid, not the password so I could "recover the user id". Great, went back to the site and clicked the link and guess what? I need my unique tax reference number. I was fairly sure what it was anyway and I tried that and that appeared to work. It turns out the number I had written on last years piece of paper was the user id even though I had a card with an alpha-numeric user id on it, the proper one was just numbers.
High security or just a pain?
At least I can find out how many pence I owe HMRC. great.

Tax Return - My Head Hurts

I have to fill in a tax return. No big deal, I'm comfortable with taxes/income/expenses etc and the online system seems to ask most of the right questions. The pain for me is that I can't log in to the stupid thing. I eventually found the government gateway card which of course I haven't seen since last year. For all the fervour, the government gateway have decided that we need to have automatically generated alpha-numeric user ids of 12 characters. Great! Not remembering that then! I can remember my NI number, bank account numbers and even my online bank user id but not this one. So anyway, I go to login - what was the password? Oh that's OK, I found my last year piece of paper which I have written my password down on so now we have zero security if anyone rifles through my desk - they will find user id and password. I tried to login and it failed. I tried all the normal passwords I use and none of them work so I have to use the trusty old "forgot password" link. Now every other site in the world will simply ask you to fill in your registered email address and they'll send you a link. Perhaps a security question just in case and you're away but not HMRC.gov.uk. You need to type in your userid (got than on a card) the email address you registered with - funnily enough forgot that too so tried a few. Then you have to fill in your national insurance number (i know that off by heart) and the dreaded Unique Taxpayers Reference (as if they haven't already asked for everything). NOT ONE piece of paper from HMRC contains a line saying anything like UTR. I have about 10 different tax references and one number appears a few times that certainly looks like it might be a unique tax reference but after all that NO DICE.
I have to call them up. No doubt they have to employ 10000 helpdesk staff because they system is so typically over the top stupid crap that probably 50% of people have to call it every year. No doubt they will ask me security questions, probably which I've forgotten and then they'll have to send me a new password in the post or some other very insecure system.
The worst thing is, apart from my PAYE, I've only earned about £75 for the year and paid tax on most of it already and people wonder why most folk can't be arsed to fill in their tax return honestly.
"Tax doesn't have to be taxing" maybe not but unfortunately the HMRC website does have to be taxing.