Christian discipleship and suffering

I want to jot down some thoughts on suffering in Christian theology. Christians have often made suffering into a large pillar of our practical theology as well as folk theologies. Penance and sacrifice have often been considered important spiritual practices and disciplines, crucial to the Christian pilgrimage through life. Years ago sacrifice was the big word for this, today I often hear people say that suffering and taking on others suffering is what the christian life is about. We've shifted from sacrifice to suffering and suffering with, but it's all cut from the same cloth as far as I can tell.
My concern with this is that it causes us to place precedence on suffering itself; that we come close to making suffering something necessary or good in itself. I have no problem with suffering per se, but I do have a problem when it becomes an end in itself, or something that is considered (if not consciously, in practice) something to be sought out or the purpose of our existence as Christians in this world. Theology of suffering comes up most clearly in theologies of incarnation, and I have heard often enough that our purpose as Christians is to bear the cross, sacrifice, suffer etc.
I would rather place love as primary; and note that suffering in its truest sense (can one make a distinction between suffering and pain?) only comes when one loves. Suffering in this sense is a result of loving the world around one (world in the John 3.16 sense) even when that world is not how it should be. If I do not love it is difficult for me to really suffer, beyond simple physical pain. The suffering, say, of a person dying of cancer is not simply the pain of the illness, but the emotional anguish that “this ought not to be,” of a life taken too soon, of anticipating the loss of those left behind who must carry on without the one who is dying, the one both loved and loving. In relationships, suffering comes about often when one loves another who does not return that love, or loves another who is going through something that raises our indignation, evoking the attitude of the lament psalm.
But let us not say that this is some how the goal or the telos of the Christian life—not something necessary. Suffering, like evil, pain, and all the other infirmities brought about by the fall, are absences and aberrations.