Hlas column: In 'retirement,' Kurt Warner is staying busy and reaching out to people

@kurt13warner My 4yrOlds height is right below my waist, so all day long when they want my attention they hit me, u no where, uggh, waiting 4 growth spurt

You can be famous and wealthy. But if you have 4-year-old twins and seven children in all, there's always something to keep you grounded.

Kurt Warner is using the Internet to take himself to the people, warts and laughs and serious reflections and all. While many celebs use social media as purely promotional tools, the son of Cedar Rapids and recently retired NFL star is using Twitter to get people to know him, and vice versa.

“So many people just know me based on football,” Warner said Friday. “This has been a means for us to share more in depth of who we really are and what are lives are really like.”

After putting his kids to bed at night, Warner will log on to Twitter to give anecdotes about his day (usually involving his family), share thoughts about his faith that he feels are important to him, and ask people to share thoughts and questions with him.

Bring it, he'll often say. They always do.

Warner responds to many seeking inspiration or friendship, and has picked up almost 20,000 followers in just several weeks' time.

“I think what we've always been about is being real and sharing our real-life story with people, and trying to connect with them,” he said.

“For us, the greatest way that we've always been able to have an impact on somebody's life is through a relationship, connecting with them. You can write a check or you can lend your voice or your name to something, but it doesn't have nearly as dramatic an effect on a life as a relationship.”

Kurt and his wife, Brenda, helped provide friendship and attention to a Habitat for Humanity building project near the northern edge of Cedar Rapids. People whose homes were destroyed by the flood of 2008 are benefitting from the Habitat volunteers' labor.

The week before, the Warner family accompanied 10 Make-A-Wish Foundation families to Disney World

for a week as part of Warner's First Things First Foundation. It was the ninth-straight year the Warners have taken Make-A-Wish families there.

They have spent much of the last month away from their Paradise Valley, Ariz., home on these personal missions.

“We've been blessed with an amazing opportunity and platform to give back,” Warner said. “Now (without football's time-constraints) we can do that as much as we want.

“My career was great, but that chapter's over. Now we're on to bigger and better things. I could walk away healthy and I can watch my kids grow up.”

Warner began using Twitter this spring. The ex-Arizona Cardinals quarterback has thrown himself into it.

“It's a neat means to be able to reach a lot of people in a short period of time,” he said, “but it's like anything else we do. If we do it, we want to do it for the right reasons.

“If people know us and know what we're about, they're going to be much more apt to support what we do and listen to things we say and have believed for a long time.”

Here's what a Super Bowl and NFL regular-season MVP wrote Friday afternoon after a day with the Habitat folks:

@kurt13warner Felt like a man today! Built a house: put up walls, used a saw, hammered nails, etc... felt good helping a fam rebuild their lives!