NFL quarterback Kurt Warner plays supportive role to his evangelical Christian wife as she tours the country spreading her message of hope and faith

By Daily Mail Reporter

PUBLISHED: 13:13 EST, 9 September 2012 | UPDATED: 09:00 EST, 10 September 2012

Throughout her husband's successful NFL career, Brenda Warner was always in the background playing the supportive wife - so much so that she was often referred to as the Yoko Ono of football.

But now the tables have turned. As thousands of Christian women flock to hear Mrs Warren speak, quarterback Kurt Warner takes a back seat as it is he who takes on the supporting role.

Two years into his retirement, Warner's life now is very different from his football playing days when he was former quarterback for the St Louis Rams and Arizona Cardinals and two-time National Football League MVP.

Now, he is surrounded by women - with his wife Brenda being at the epicenter of these women.

Today on TV: The Warners are using Kurt's fame to share their faith and are building a home for the developmentally disabled

Role reversal: Brenda Warner is a famous evangelical speaker who tours around America with a message of hope and faith, drawing inspiration from the many tragedies in her own life

Family life: Brenda congratulates her husband during his football playing days, left and right, with their daughter Sierra as he announces his retirement

Mrs Warner is a famous evangelical speaker who tours around America with a message of hope and faith, drawing inspiration from the many tragedies in her own life, teaching how God helped her through them to get to where she is today, according to CNN.

Brenda is one of the headliners on the 2012 Women of Faith tour - which attracts tens of thousands of Christian women wherever they go - and Kurt will be with her every step of the way.

The couple have been together through thick and thin and spread the message of their Christian faith

Listening to Brenda give her life story at the Verizon center in Washington recently, one woman told CNN: 'Brenda Warner is no longer Kurt Warner’s wife. Kurt Warner is now Brenda Warner’s husband.'

Her life has been filled with ups and downs, tragedies and triumphs.

She said she got her calling from God when she was 12 years old and joined the Marine Corps aged 18. Brenda met and married a fellow marine and they had a child together called Zachary.

Then one day one phone call changed her whole life - her husband had accidentally dropped their son on his head, something which would leave him blind and brain damaged for life.

Brenda fell pregnant again soon after, but one month before her due date her husband left her for another woman.

She moved back in with her mother, to raise two children of her own -  largely existing on food stamps and handouts.

Then in 1996, she received another phone call which would affect her lives for years to come -  her mother and father, who had retired to a cabin in Arkansas, had been killed in a tornado.

'They were always my soft place to fall,' Brenda told the Washington crowd.

Now a registered nurse, everything changed when she met Kurt Warner in a bar when he was playing college football at the University of Northern Iowa.

She worried he wouldn’t be able to handle the fact she was divorced with two kids. But after just one date, he arrived at her home to meet her children and Brenda said this was the moment she fell in love.

Gesturing towards her supportive husband at the speech, she tells the crowd: 'I married that football player. He adopted my two and we have five more.'

Brenda supported her husband from his AFL career to NFL and was a stay-at-home mom, though Kurt for years encouraged his wife to pursue her speaking career.

Big Family: Former NFL quarterback Kurt Warner with Brenda Warner and their five children last year. Kurt adopted her two other children (not pictured) from a previous marriage

Brenda and Kurt with her two children from a previous marriage, including Zachary, left, who became blind and brain-damaged after being dropped on his head when he was a baby

Now that he has retired and can be a stay-at-home dad, she is free to do that.

Kurt told CNN: 'What we have realized is there are seasons in all of our lives and dreams take sacrifices but they become family things. Dreams are family dreams.'

With her story of triumph over tragedy, and with the backing of her famous husband, Brenda has her own career on the Christian-speaking circuit.

She told CNN that God has this plan for her and she intends to tell her story and spread the word that he is the cure to heartache.

'He called me by name, he loves me and he won’t leave me. God was true to his word that he wouldn’t leave me.'