Empty Section with Dynamic Condition and Dynamic OrderBy Field

Hi, love your plugin.

Please help me with a problem I am having. I have searched the forum throughout and can’t find any solution. I have 6 posts with a metadata event_start_date. 5 posts have a start date after today and 1 before today.

I created a loop with a dynamic condition “all posts less than today will be hidden (1 post will be hidden)”.

On my template, I added a post widget and set Advanced OrderBy Options order by event_start_date. When I set 1 post per page, the result is empty because the first post in event_start_date would be the expired post. When I set to 6 posts per page, it shows 1 empty section and 5 posts after that.

Am I setting this up incorrectly? Is there a way to order by event_start_date, but leave out the expired post completely? No matter how many columns I put, the left most column is empty followed by my 2nd post in the 2nd column. I don’t want to start off with an empty section due to the expired post. If this continues, when the 2nd post expires, there will be two empty columns before showing unexpired posts.