Lisa Barlow’s son Jack’s mission trip has been a hot topic on season 4 of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, but now some fans think the teenager has swapped Colombia for Orange County.
Earlier this week, a Reddit user claimed to have seen Jack, 19, at a TJ Maxx in Tustin, California, wearing a name badge that identified him as a missionary. As RHOSLC viewers know, however, Jack was originally assigned to Bogotá, Colombia, which is more than 3,000 miles away from Southern California.
While fans immediately began speculating that Lisa, 48, barred her son from traveling to Bogotá, the Bravolebrity chimed in to set the record straight. “His VISA was delayed ♥️,” she tweeted on Monday, November 13.
Jack previously shocked his mom by revealing that he decided to postpone college so he could go on a mission with his church. Mormon missionaries spend up to two years in their assigned location, doing volunteer work and proselytizing. While Lisa and her husband, John Barlow, are Mormon, they were surprised to learn that Jack was interested in going on a mission.
“When he told us, I was crying because I haven’t been involved in the process,” Lisa told John in a September episode of RHOSLC. “I think I’m still dealing with the emotion that I had no idea, and he’s been prepping for a year, and then it makes me think that maybe he does need more time with me, or maybe he just wants less.”
Lisa and her family learned that Jack would be going to Colombia during a “mission reveal party” that was filmed for an October episode of the show. During a confessional interview, Lisa admitted that she was nervous about her son traveling to the South American country.
“I cannot believe he’s going to Colombia,” Lisa told the cameras. “He’ll probably be held up at gunpoint at least once or twice on his mission. My friend’s son was just there. He was held up at gunpoint, like, weekly, so he carried, like, an extra few bucks in pocket and just, like, handed it over. He’s like, ‘OK, I see the gun, here’s the cash.’ But I mean, overall, it’s thrilling.”
At the party, Lisa told her family that she’d been “expecting, like, Europe or something, or New York.”
Lisa’s friend and fellow Salt Lake City Housewife Heather Gay, meanwhile, felt like it was odd that Lisa didn’t talk to her about the mission following the February publication of her memoir, Bad Mormon, which detailed her own experience in the church. When they discussed the situation at Angie Katsanevas’ Greek Easter lunch, however, Lisa wasn’t willing to go too deep on the subject.
“The whole thing with Jack’s mission, I would love [it] if you could talk to me about that in a way that’s constructive,” Heather, 49, told her costar, who replied, “I don’t feel comfortable talking about all this with you.”
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City airs on Bravo Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
