A parasitic worm boring through your body is necessary for the life of the parasitic worm, but God could have made a universe with no parasites if he wanted.

Stress and hardship can have many causes and many of them have no meaning at all. Being born in to a third world country with extreme poverty for example.

That's only if you can do something about it and in some cases were people can do something about it but convince themselves they cannot.

The only personal growth you can get from suffering you can do nothing about is in coping strategies - i.e. change yourself so that the suffering can be more easilly endured - and that's for people whose coping strategy doesn't lead them into becoming defeatist, fatalist or subservient (depening on the source and kind of suffering).

(Just look at people in abusive relationships who are unable to leave the abusive partner for great examples of how suffering leads some people to change in a direction which is the exact opposite of grow and develop)

I think it would be more correct to say that "challenge" allows us to grow and develop, which does include those forms of suffering were one can do something about it but that's not easy to do (hence challenging)

Tell that to the African child dying of dysentery on a bank of a severely polluted river whilst a parasitic worm bores in to their eye ball.

Apologists like you make me sick.