A Room in a Cold City: Loneliness, Migration and the Households That Take Us In

The first room is often the same, whichever city it is in. A single bed, a small wardrobe, a window that looks onto someone else’s wall. A shared kitchen with labelled shelves in the fridge. A radiator that knocks at night. The phone is the loudest thing in the room: voice notes from home, a mother asking whether you are eating properly, a group chat where everyone is at the beach.

Ask people in the diaspora about their early months abroad and many will describe some version of this. Not necessarily hardship, though often that too, but a particular loneliness. The kind that comes from being surrounded by people and known by none of them.

Home is more than a roof

We tend to talk about migration in practical terms: visas, jobs, rent, sending money back. Housing is often a matter of survival first, somewhere affordable near work or a bus route. But a home is more than a roof over a bed. It is where you are expected, where someone notices if you do not come back, where you can cook your own food and laugh in your own accent.

A rented room can be clean, legal and perfectly adequate, and still not feel like home at all. That gap is where much of migration’s loneliness lives.

“God sets the solitary in families”

Psalm 68 describes God as “a father of the fatherless, a defender of widows” and then adds: “God sets the solitary in families” (Psalm 68:5-6, NKJV). It is a beautiful promise, and it is worth noticing how it is usually fulfilled. God rarely drops a new family from the sky. He sets people in households that already exist, and those households have to open their doors.

Many who migrated a generation ago can name the family that did this for them. The church couple who had them for Sunday dinner every week that first winter. The auntie, not a real aunt, who let them stay in the box room until they found their feet. The landlord who turned out to be from the same parish and treated them like a nephew. These households did not solve every problem. They simply made someone feel expected.

A composite story

Consider a young nurse who arrives in a northern English town on a work visa. She shares a house with four strangers, works night shifts and spends her days off asleep or on the phone home. At church, the welcome is warm but brief. After a few months, an older Caribbean couple notice she always leaves right after the service. They invite her for lunch. Then again. Before long she has a key to their back door, a seat at their table on Sundays, and someone to call when her car will not start.

Her rented room is the same. Her life is not.

If you are the one alone

Loneliness can make it hard to reach out. It can feel like weakness, or like imposing. But the psalm is a promise, and promises can be prayed. Ask God specifically to set you in a family. Then look for the small doors: the church small group, the choir, the community association, the colleague who mentions they are from the same island. Accept invitations even when you are tired. Offer to help with something; being useful is one of the fastest ways to belong.

If loneliness is turning into something heavier, such as persistent low mood, trouble sleeping or losing interest in things you used to enjoy, please speak to a doctor or a trusted pastor. That is not a failure of faith.

If you are the one with the home

For those of us who are settled, with a house, a table and a family around us, the psalm is a quiet call. Who in our church, workplace or street is solitary? The newly arrived student. The widower whose children are abroad. The young man renting the room over the shop. Hospitality does not need a large house or a big budget. A plate of rice and peas, an open invitation to watch the cricket, a lift to church.

Scripture repeatedly reminds God’s people that they were once strangers themselves (Deuteronomy 10:19). Many diaspora families know that literally. The best way to honour those who took us in is to do the same for the next person getting off the plane.

A house becomes a home when people are expected in it. Sometimes the person we are expecting is someone we have not yet met.

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