Displaying posts with only upcoming dates according their custom field date value

For this to work reliably, the date format in the database should be yyyy-mm-dd. Comparison type should be DATE or NUMERIC. If you take the date of 25-04-2012 in present format and compare it numerically to the date 26-04-1986, you can see what the issue will be: 25042012 < 26041986

ALso- if you’re doing these queries in addition to your main loop, use a new instance of WP_Query.

EDIT-

there were a few errors you didn’t fix. note that this still won’t work quite right until you fix the date format.

<?php
$today = date('m/d/Y', strtotime('+2 hours'));
$the_query = new WP_Query( array(
  'post_type' => 'events',
  'posts_per_page' => 5,
  'meta_key' => 'start_date',
  'orderby' => 'meta_value',
  'order' => 'ASC',
  'meta_query' => array(
  array(
    'key' => 'start_date',
    'value' => $today,
    'compare' => '>=',
    'type' => 'DATE'
  ))
));
?>