We often talk of God being all powerful or omnipotent, but there is a wide range of what Omnipotence can mean in a religion.
At the broadest margins, God is powerful enough to embrace and create paradox. God can both create a weight so heavy he cannot lift it and lift the weight. Or, in the classic joke, God can have a creation where all religions are simultaneously correct.
On the other hand, God needs only be powerful enough to eventually save us in the end, if we are faithful. Creation runs the gamut of God creating everything ex nihilo (from nothing) to God organizing or working within an existing creation and material world. It runs the range of God being God at a sub-atomic level dictating the path of every particle and state across the entire universe to God shepherding the large trends on one world (or even just a sub-set of that world).
The level and type of omnipotence that God has also ties into who or whom God is. Is God a title? A Godhead? A divine choir? Ineffable?
This also ties into the question of evil. If God is an extreme edge omnipotent (controls the universe at a quantum level, can embrace and create and sustain paradox) then why is there evil or pain? On the other hand, if God is working within an existing system and has sufficient omnipotence to save us at the end of the day in spite of the pre-existing imperfections in the system, one might wonder why there isn’t even more evil and pain.
So, how do you view the omnipotence of God, where does evil come from, and what do you expect from God?
Wheat & Tares 
In college my friend convinced me to read _When Bad Things Happen to Good People_ by Harold Kushner. Essentially, his solution to evil and suffering in the world was to conclude that God, although all-loving, was not really omnipotent. Those limitations rendered him unable to eliminate all suffering.
Rather than denying God’s omnipotence, I think most Mormons would argue that God has self-imposed limitations by conforming to established laws and guidelines. If he did not abide by those laws, He’d cease to be God.
If God is eternal and embodies goodness, it stands to reason that evil (as the opposite of goodness) has always existed in one form or another. Perhaps it’s better stated as an eternal battle between order and chaos, given that order implies those rules God abides.
You’ve hit chaos as being feral … nicely done.
As to “self-imposed limitations by conforming to established laws and guidelines.” — but why must God conform to those instead of changing them?
Well articulated questions. Mormons believe in a “local” God, one of many other gods working within an existing creation, and we here on earth are part of His particular “stewardship.” Mormonism solves the problem of evil by making it co-existant with God, just as we are co-existant with God. God is simply one of us, who is guiding us through the evil to become like Him. This means that God in LDS theology is NOT omnipotent.
But Mormons also like to think of God in traditional ways, as omnipotent, as the creator of the world, as micromanaging all the details of our lives. When we think of God in this way, I think we are using “God” as a placeholder for a basic belief that our lives and the universe has meaning and purpose.
Makes me want to toss in the operational definition used by twelve step programs.
I wonder if understanding self-imposed limitations would be an ultimate form of discipline? We see Christ volunteering to abide by a pre-existing plan rather than Satan’s rebellious new plan. The idea of members of godhead being “united in purpose” always in my mind denoted a type of agreed-upon plan. Also God willingly binding himself to covenants with mortals. All indicates a willful restriction of power.
The idea of the Wisdom Literature implies universal laws discernable by observation. Willing aherence to universal laws would then align ourselves more closely with God’s will, since he is fully aligned with those universal laws. It’s why I tend to see Lady Wisdom more as a Light of Christ enticing all creation towards God, since it entices us towards adherence towards universal laws. Also somehow bound with priesthood power, since that is understood in our doctrine as the power whereby matter is organized. Still wrapping my head around it, but that’s the direction I’ve been leaning.
The LDS Church has a minimum definition of Omnipotence in the “Book of Abraham”:
“There is nothing that the Lord thy God shall take in his heart to do but what he will do it.”
That is, anything got want to do he can (and will!) do.
You, too, can have this level of Omnipotence simply by not wanting to do anything you can’t.
Of course, God may actually be a lot more Omnipotent than that.
(This is weak sauce for the question “Why am I suffering like this?”. Answer: Because God does not want me not to.)
That should be “God wants”, not “got want”. Maybe Freudian.
This physical reality in which we are all embedded limits our ability to conceptualize anything outside of this physical reality, including a concept of God. Just a glimpse outside would convince us that we don’t have a clue when it comes to understanding non-physical reality and whether or not there is anything even approaching our feeble attempts to conceptualize God.