During the past week I've heard a lot of people express their outrage at the 32-year-old Georgia runaway bride.

Not me.

I remember what it was like to be 32 and wanting to run away. In fact, I did run away. I ran away from Utah, my job and my weekly paycheck. Of course, I also took my wife, Bette, and four kids with me when I ran off to Colorado to start my own business.

It didn't take me much longer than it took the runaway bride to get scared in a new town. I quickly ran out of money and wanted my old job back. I didn't call 911, but I did call my former employer, only to be told that my job was filled.

Now what was I to do? I had burned my bridge back to home, comfort and security. My only choice was to do what I had gone to Denver to do: to start my own business and bring home some bacon to feed those bird-like mouths that seemed to gape open, wanting not one, not two but three meals a day.

Bette was patient. She only got upset once - but with good reason. One day during the first month she called me at my new office, which was on the seventh floor of a 13-story office building. It had been a discouraging day, and she could hear the frustration in my voice.

"So what are you doing?" she asked.

"I'm standing here on the balcony," I replied. "I think I know why some people jump."

I meant that as a joke. Honest, I did. I wasn't really considering the ultimate runaway. But in the context of the moment, it was a dumb thing to say. Bette went from concerned to frantic in about 1.5 seconds, and she pleaded with me not to jump.

It's probably coincidental that I made my first sale later that same day, and I was on Cloud Nine by the time I came home.

Life is like that for runaway brides and runaway entrepreneurs. It's scary and exciting - often on the same day. But it's almost always interesting.

I wanted to run away again when my first employee did her own runaway act. Her name was Lynda. She went to lunch and never came back to work. My second employee was no better. After she fell off her secretarial chair twice before lunch, I suggested that I didn't think it was going to work out between us. I sent her away the first day.

I thought I was getting used to the thrills and chills of self-employment until I couldn't make payroll one week. I felt like running away again, and I fully expected my employees to do the same thing. But they stuck with me until a client paid me with a check that actually cleared the bank. There were loud cheers all around that day - especially from the wide-mouth youngsters sitting around my dinner table.

I only felt like running away one other time. I had to gather my employees together to announce that I had sold the business. I told them they would like this new owner better, that the benefit package was going to be stronger and there would be more opportunities for them to move up with a national company.

They all wanted to know what I was going to do since I had sold the business. I was a little embarrassed as I admitted, "Oh, I am going to run away."

And I did. From that day to this, I've never looked back.

It seems to me that we all run away from something at some point in our lives. So let's not be too harsh with the runaway bride. Sometimes running away turns out to be the start of an incredible journey.