I turn on the music. The car fills with the strains of an orchestra-backed choir pelting out “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” The tension of my frazzled morning starts to melt and joy returns.

How is it that Christmas music can make me feel so good? And it's not just music. The lights and decorations, gift-giving and receiving, with all our other December traditions,seem to work together to bring us moments of quiet peace, soaring joy or swelling love that rise above life's worries and irritations. Sure, we sometimes feel grumpy and frazzled. And at times we feel close to toppling under the weight of our materialism. But still something of wonder and joy and peace breaks through. Is our December happiness created by sentimentality, nostalgia, some association with warm childhood memories?

What is it about Christmas? This joy is not just for me, nor only for those who share my Christian faith. Last weekend, thousands of people, religious and secular, eagerly filed into the University of Michigan's Hill Auditorium, as they do every year, to listen to Handel's Messiah. They experienced joy in the beauty of the words and music. There is something so big in Christmas that it spills over to bless those who don't know the coming of Jesus as the source of joy. I can delight in gifts received from an anonymous lover. But when that lover reveals himself to me, the joy is much deeper. So we and our neighbors and friends celebrate Christmas with different kinds of gladness, and whether or not we are aware of it, it is all made possible by the coming of God into our world.

But this December, I'm also mindful of four families who wait anxiously for the arrival of a child: a boy in Russia and another in Liberia, a girl in Haiti, and a brother and sister waiting in Michigan's foster care system. Two of these children are teenagers and at risk of passing the window of time in which they can be adopted. One has a problem with his heart. There is urgency, agony, pounding on the door of heaven for the release of children to families who wait for them. These families can't celebrate Christmas without remembering the children they long for, and all the most beautiful Christmas music in the world can't make them stop worrying about the welfare of these boys and girls.

So I wonder something else: What does our Christmas joy have to do with the waiting of orphans for homes? Music, worship, festively decorated homes, hospitality, good meals, packages, gift exchanges, friends and family – what have all of these to do with these hurting, waiting children? Is there any connection?

And how do families waiting to adopt children keep Christmas? Do they try for a measured celebration that somehow keeps in mind the longing and pain they feel on behalf of the orphaned children in their thoughts? Do they go through an essentially “normal” Christmas, with some sad thoughts spared for children who are hungry, lonely, in danger? Should we feel guilty about our relative wealth and comfort and the leisure of our holiday celebration, concerned about orphans and outcasts, but not knowing exactly what to do about it?

We celebrate the King who was born poor, who was a refugee at a young age, who later knew all kinds of human suffering, injustice and rejection. If anything is true about our faith, it must be that Christmas is for orphans, that it's not just a holiday of luxury for the financially and socially secure.

Our King came to seek and save the lost. He came to bind up the brokenhearted. He came to proclaim freedom to captives. His Kingdom is a like a small rock that grows until it becomes a mountain that fills the whole earth. I don't know what that means for children waiting in Russia, Liberia, Haiti and Michigan. I don't know what it means for all the orphans in the world who seem to have no hope and no one to advocate for them. This is beyond my understanding. Wholehearted Christmas joy and worship need not mean complacency towards orphans. I grieve for these children and yet rejoice that they are, somehow, in the hands of the King who came. Oh, the joy of worshiping such a King!

We may choose to be counter-cultural in our celebration of Christmas. We may choose to be sacrificial. But we need not be half-hearted or detached.