This is the foul breath of despair, and it comes from the pit. You speak of preferring death, but death is the door to judgment, and what then? To meet God with a self-inflicted end, that is to crown a life of rebellion with a final act of defiance. I charge you, this is no ordinary sigh; it is an insult flung into the face of a gracious God who gives you breath. No mortal has a just pretense to perish in despair, for despair is a form of willful self-destruction, a high insult to the living God. What right have you to unmake what He has made, or to dictate the terminus of the life He alone sustains?
Your thoughts are not God's thoughts. Your ways are sinking into the mire, but His ways are as high as the heavens above the earth. While you measure out your misery and conclude the sum is too great to bear, He is thinking upon you thoughts of peace, constant, kind, tender, and perfect. How precious are His thoughts unto you if you could but rise from your despondency to consider them! His mercy is looking upon your heart of adamant even now, able to melt it until it becomes as wax. Your sigh of hopelessness is met by His long-suffering, which bears with this impenitence and puts its own hand to the work to turn it into contrition of soul.
Consider the suffering of Christ, which alone gives meaning to your own. He was made a perfect Savior through His sufferings. You cannot cast human suffering into any shape that is new to Him; He has traversed every corridor of anguish, including the desolation that makes a soul cry out in forsakenness. But His suffering was no warrant for despair. He suffered, yet He never rebelled. He drank the cup completely, trusting Him who judges righteously. He knows the unrighteous thoughts that swarm about a tormented mind, for He suffered being tempted, yet without sin. His purity made His suffering through temptation far keener than any you can know, so He enters fully into your gloom. But mark this: Jesus did not despair. Jesus triumphed, and He cries to you, "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."
Your suffering, as it stands, is the common lot of fallen humanity. Do not dream that because you suffer, you are suffering with Christ. If you remain in this state of nature, you are not suffering with Him; you are simply being plagued with the fruit of the old Adam. The suffering which brings the reigning with Jesus must be a suffering with Jesus, a suffering that comes from conformity to His image, not from a sullen desire to cast off His yoke. This desire for death, if unchecked, degrades you below the brute beast, for even an insect struggles when cut in halves. You sigh, but if you mind not what you are doing, what you say in your despair will come true through your own making it so. It will seal you in the very destruction you pronounce.
The purpose of God stands, unchangeable and unhurried. He is in one mind, and who can turn Him? What His soul desireth, that He doeth. Your despair cannot make void His purpose nor disappoint the bleeding Lamb. If you will not come, others will. Perhaps your own kin shall be made willing while you reject. But I urge you, instead, to meditate upon Him who suffered outside the gate to sanctify you. Go outside the camp of your self-pity and bear the reproach with Him. There, in that furnace, you will find He is still with you, and when you awake, you may say, "I am still with Thee." The way out of this pit is not the knife or the halter, but a glance toward the crucified One, who has sanctified suffering and guarantees a harvest of joy from the travail of His soul. He shall see the fruit of it. Look to Him, and let your despair be denounced by the grace He freely gives.