Sabrina,
Patience is required on both sides I guess
He does what he wants. No, he does not cause all things. Yes, he can stop all things. The rape example was in the God does not cause all things category, but that does not mean God limits himself or in other words always allows the will of others to take precedence over his purposes.
Except for the word "always" (which would actually answer another of my questions), I don't really understand why you are reluctant to say "God limits himself" (even temporarily), which afaik is the classical Christian stance on theodicy. For the moment being, I can't think of other alternatives than "he just wants it this way" (so he might just as well cause it all) or "he doesn't care," which you probably wouldn't agree with either.
(Side comment: about "God limiting himself," you might have a look someday at the qabbalistic theory of zimzum [or tzimtzum], which is exposed at the very beginning of the Zohar: the "contraction" or "shrinking" of the original unknowable deity ['en soph] is the very first act of creation, a prerequisite for anything else, including non-being or chaos, to "exist" at all.)
To me the apory of theodicy has been summed up once for all by Dostoievsky through his character Ivan Karamazov. It shatters all attempts at diluting the problem into time or numbers. From this point of view there is no need of tsunamis or Auschwitz or Pol Pot to get the point: no redemption is worth the suffering of one single child. The imagination of an almighty and loving God passively watching for any reason just shouldn't survive it. What might survive is the Deistic idea of a God that might not be loving or the Gnostic idea of a God that might not be an almighty Creator. In any case, it is not the orthodox Christian God.
Now I admit that this is a highly emotional and subjective line of reasoning, but religiously it convinces me. To me the very concept of "God" as Creator and almighty is deeply antithetic to the Christian intuition which identifies the deity with the sufferer (even though you are not a Trinitarian I think you get the point). Nietzsche got that point too when he remarked that the God which Paul created (the God of the Cross) is actually a negation of God. He said that against Paul and Christianity. But it can also mean that Christians would actually benefit from taking off the outworn garment of theism which never really suited them.
