Lent calls us to wake from our spiritual sleep

Few people like to be awaken by an alarm clock from a sound sleep. Some people will turn the alarm off and go back to sleep. Others will repeatedly hit the snooze button trying to get some additional sleep. Others will get up and get going.
Lent is sort of like an alarm clock. We are often spiritually asleep and we can react to Lent as people react to the alarm clock: some ignore it, some keep putting it off, others get up and get going.
Lent challenges us to take a good look at ourselves as we truly are, see our sins, and change. So how do we “get up and get going spiritualy?” Jesus tells us two ways: “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” (Mk 1:15)
Repent calls us to acknowledge our sinfulness. Too often we excuse ourselves by saying that the fault lies outside of us. We make excuses for ourselves by saying that I would be better if only he would change or she would change or the situation would change. 
God looks at us and says “if only you would change.” We are called to admit we are sinners. There is only one person in the world we can change and that is us. Saint Teresa of Calcutta was once asked what in the world needs to change, and she answered, “me.”
To believe in the Gospel means to believe that the power of God can change us if we allow God to do so. If we believe that God has the power to create this cosmos with its billions of galaxies each containing billions of stars, can we not believe that God has the power to create new life in us? 
We can come up with so many ways to try to keep from changing. We can say that I have been this way so long that I cannot change, or we will say that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Nonsense. With God all things are possible, even change within ourselves.
So the answer is up to us. Lent calls us to wake from our spiritual sleep. We choose to either go back to sleep or to get up and get going. Our eternal salvation is at stake. I offer these words by St. John Henry Newman:

Each of us must come to the evening of life. Each of us must enter on eternity. Each of us must come to that quiet, awful time, when we will appear before the Lord of the vineyard, and answer for the deeds done in the body, whether they be good or bad. That, my dear brethren, you will have to undergo. … It will be the dread moment of expectation when your fate for eternity is in the balance, and when you are about to be sent forth as the companion of either saints or devils, without possibility of change. There can be no change; there can be no reversal. As that judgment decided it, so it will be forever and ever. Such is the particular judgment … when we find ourselves, one by one, in His presence, and have brought before us most vividly all the thoughts, words, and deeds of this past life. Who will be able to bear the sight of himself?
And yet we shall be obliged steadily to confront ourselves. In this life we shrink from knowing our real selves. We do not like to know how sinful we are. We love those who prophecy smooth things to us, we are angry with those who tell us of our faults. But defects of our character will be clearly brought out. We shall see what we feared to see here, and much more. And then, when the full sight of ourselves comes to us, who will not wish that he had known more of himself here, rather than leaving it for the inevitable day to reveal it all to Him! (From: A Year with the Saints)

The words are not meant to depress us but to give us wisdom. God does not wish us to admit our sins so that He can condemn us but so that He can save us. Repent and believe in the Gospel. The alarm is ringing.