If you want to use a date field to sort by, then it's imperative that you store your data in a good format. I always store dates in the MySQL format: YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS
That means that everything sorts correctly because a year is greater than a month is greater than a day etc. If you want to format that date differently for your users, then fine: use PHP's date functions to modify it when you print it. I built a lot of convenience stuff into GetPostsQuery, so you could do something like this in your theme file
require_once(CCTM_PATH.'/includes/GetPostsQuery.php'); // if necessary
$Q = new GetPostsQuery();
$args = array();
$args['post_type'] = 'my_events'; // for example
$args['orderby'] = 'event_date'; // or any reg. or custom field
$args['date_format'] = 2; // or any valid date format.
// Shortcuts for the date_format function:
// 1 = 'F j, Y, g:i a' March 10, 2011, 5:16 pm
// 2 = 'j F, Y' 10 March, 2011
// 3 = 'l F jS, Y' Thursday March 10th, 2011
// 4 = 'n/j/y' 3/30/11
// 5 = 'n/j/Y' 3/30/2011
$results = $Q->get_posts($args);
// print each result out the way you want, as list items, paragraphs etc.
// etc.
See the following wiki pages for examples:
http://code.google.com/p/wordpress-custom-content-type-manager/wiki/get_posts_examples
http://code.google.com/p/wordpress-custom-content-type-manager/wiki/get_posts#date_format