Your pastor highly recommends this article to explain the significance of receiving ashes on Ash Wednesday. I could not have said it better myself.

Lent is a season of repentance. We need such a season. We need to receive instruction on sin, repentance and sin's remission only by the blood of Christ. The Holy Blood shed on the cross, and received in the Cup. Both!

But our instruction must not be haphazard; because we rarely will do what is spiritually advantageous. It must be programmatic! If there were no church year, no season of Lent it is doubtful that I would be writing to you this way today.

But there is Lent! God be praised, so that we need not be lost now and eternally in the outer darkness, where there is only "weeping and gnashing of teeth" in which our sin keeps us imprisoned.