What to do with prophetic words
God is always talking to us. Prophecy is the word we use when we share things that God has said to us, with someone else. Some people have a complicated relationship with prophecy, ranging from total avoidance due to religious trauma, to ritual obligation and rule-following to force the prophecy to manifest, to claiming that God doesn’t speak anymore necessitating that all such "prophecies" are fabrications. If God is good, and God is in everything, then I think it’s OK for us to take a deep breath, allow peace to enter us and approach prophecy with simple humility.
God is always speaking, because God is love, and love is generous and encouraging in nature. Love flows out of God in a never-ending cascade, bathing all of creation in transforming light. Sometimes when God speaks, God uses words. Sometimes God speaks in tears. Sometimes God speaks in pictures.
Why does God speak? Because divine love wants us to know we’re invited. All communication that comes from God is designed to draw us into relationship with the community of love that is the Trinity. Relationship is God's goal. For that reason, all prophecy is best interpreted as an invitation to learn more about the character of God and respond to it.
It so happens that the Bible also does the same job. It's a collection of letters and stories that various people told various other people, in order to help them understand what God was like. Those people's children shared those stories with their own children, until eventually, other people many years later found the stories to have a valuable and timeless quality, and wrote them down. Today we have this collection called the Bible and for some people, it is useful in helping them understand the character of God, and thereby, to enter into love.
Your response to prophecy is likely going to be somewhat similar to your response to Scripture. If you follow it literally to the letter you'll run into problems (murder, not least among them). If you treat it all as metaphor then you'll run into other problems (nihilism, meaninglessness, etc.). But if you treat both prophecy and Scripture as an invitation to discover more of God, and you pursue that invitation, then you'll find yourself being transformed, matured, expanded, humbled, restored to your original beauty… and that's just the beginning.
Here's a simple system for what to do with prophetic words, and how to get the most of the prophetic in general:
What does this prophetic word tell you about the character of God?
How does it line up with the character of God as revealed progressively throughout Scripture, and ultimately in Jesus Christ?
If you believed this about God, what sort of fruit might it produce in your life?
What fears are stirred up in your heart when you think of all these things?
What does God have to say about those fears?
I'm a father and I have dreams for my children's future, but I don't have a have a step-by-step, minute-by-minute plan for every moment of their lives; that would be absurd. Neither do I believe that God has a step-by-step, minute-by-minute plan for your life, or anyone else's life. I believe God's plans for this earth and for everyone on it involve getting to know the truth of love, being transformed by it, and being freed to make the same kinds of decisions that God would make: generous, others-centered, healing, restorative, forgiving, love.
Prophecy is an invitation to wake up, listen up, stand up, and embrace the journey of transformation. The journey is bathed in love. If the prophetic word you have received doesn't smell, taste or feel like love, including if it tickles your ears in a way that grants you all your desires without requiring you to grow and trust and have faith, then I give you permission to have nothing to do with it.